Perhaps Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage should join the circus. Their contortions in recent days over the economy suggest they would be star turns in the Big Top. As for , after a miserable few months at the Tory helm, a great opportunity beckons - to restore the Conservatives' reputation as the party of sound money.

Take Starmer. Only three months ago, he and his sidekick "Iron Chancellor" were promising no new tax rises after doling out the cash to their union backers while making a modest start on curbing spiralling public spending. And now? The spending cuts, trivial in comparison with our ballooning debt, are to be all but scrapped while yet more money is being handed over to public sector workers with above-inflation pay rises.

A awaits with yet more tax rises on the middle classes and the so-called "wealthy" almost inevitable in the autumn Budget.

Farage, meanwhile, has shape-shifted from being a classic low-tax, low-spend, free-market Thatcherite to the last of the big spenders.

He offers a huge rise in the tax threshold - at a cost of as much as £80 billion, and the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap. On top of that he will restore the winter fuel allowance.

It is hard to see how Farage's sums could possibly add up. If implemented his plans would trigger an investor strike with gilt yields rocketing and a market crisis of the kind that destroyed Liz Truss.

Not so much an opportunity as an open goal for Badenoch. She should remember the words of Bill Clinton - it's the economy stupid - and focus all her energies on building a credible policy that will rescue the country from looming bankruptcy.

That means regular speeches on her underlying economic philosophy - the importance of sound money and a return to the Thatcherite virtues of balancing the books and promoting growth through encouraging business and entrepreneurs.

It will also mean detailed policy papers showing how the economy can be rescued and exposing the glaring flaws in the Labour and Reform doodlings.

Labour has destroyed our growth prospects by killing incentives for UK entrepreneurs through much higher marginal tax rates, including through Inheritance tax and the new non-dom regime.

To this they have added a new labour regulation bill, with a raft of new rights for workers and unions. The party has surrendered to its age-old class hatred, promising to keep down taxes on 'workers' by raising them on 'the rich'.

The latter have responded with a massive exodus, which is ensuring that less tax is collected from them as a group. Meanwhile, productivity growth, of which entrepreneurs are the source, has flatlined.

Reform, supposedly on the political Right, is now swerving leftwards, promising lower general taxes through much higher income tax thresholds, large rises in benefits, more union rights, protectionism and nationalisation.

It is unclear how this will all be paid for; net zero would be abolished and interest would not be paid on bank reserves but these contributions fall far short of the programme's costs.

Is there perhaps also a looming plan to copy Trump's tariffs with the aim of restoring manufacturing industries in 'left-behind' Britain?

What we have seen demonstrated in recent weeks is the disastrous impact of nativist protectionism from Trump.

What tariffs do is raise the price of imported goods, so causing inflation and reducing consumer welfare, and then cause expansion in output from the protected sector at the expense of more productive alternatives.

This should encourage the Conservative party to speak up in the cause of good, sane economic policies. With Labour floundering impotently and Reform going rogue, the Conservatives have a window in which to pitch a sane but bold agenda.

Badenoch should applaud the UK's free trade policies, made possible by Brexit. Without Brexit we might have found ourselves participating involuntarily in that war, and closing down our US trade.

Besides free trade, that Reform now threatens to abandon, Conservatives must promise to restore free markets, especially in energy, repeal Labour's latest employment Bill and abolish its high marginal tax rates that are throttling our businesses.

Since these taxes are losing us revenue, there is no budgetary cost. The overall tax burden, which is now rising to a record 38 per cent of GDP, can also be brought down.

To give themselves some breathing space, Conservatives need to refocus the fiscal rules on long-term progress in bringing down the post-crash, post-Covid debt ratio, not on short-term targets five years ahead. With this refocus on the long term trend, necessary public sector reform can be put in place to cut spending rationally without 'austerity'.

The priority is to return to sound tax policies, with reformed spending to match. If the bond markets in gilts get nervous, the Bank must stand ready to intervene and calm them down. What Conservatives must stop is another Truss-style crisis which the Bank and Treasury fail to defuse as policy is remoulded towards the long term.

The Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch have the power to recover those voters who have deserted them- not by forswearing economic sense but by doubling down on it as their rivals lose the plot.

Those voters backed Margaret Thatcher as she brought sense to our economy. They will back the Conservatives again if they offer them the same good sense.