It didn’t take long, did it?

The death of the Queen had a uniting effect on the country. Most people, including half-hearted republicans like me, felt what was going on; sadness at the end of an era, the loss of the one national figurehead who kept things together. My guess is that most of us wanted things to carry on like that, too. Tired of the old divisions, the confected culture wars, the media hatred, always punching down, growing inequality. There had to be a better way. It was surely what the Queen would have wanted. But just a few days after her burial, it’s business as usual, this time on stilts.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, fresh from laughing and joking his way through the Queen’s funeral, decided to do his bit to keep us together. With record numbers using food banks, inequality rising, the NHS on its knees, people still having to sell their homes to pay for care in old age and the whole country seemingly falling apart, his priority was massive tax cuts for the mega rich. If you are waiting for a major operation or even minor treatment, these can wait while Kwarteng lifts the cap on bankers’ bonuses. How else to unite and level up the country?  Kwarteng is clearly a wrong ‘un who should have been kicked out of public life after his disgraceful behaviour at the Queen’s funeral, but today he’s a national hero, at least in the eyes of Telegraph, Express and Mail readers, although the Sun relegates the story in order to have a vicious pop at Meghan Markle. This is the opposite of being kind.

I’m a little old fashioned and my priorities don’t seem to resonate with the rest of the country. Rather than use public money to support the richest 1% in the land, I would:

• Save the NHS
• Invest in schools
• Ensure seniors have dignity in old age
• End poverty
• More of that kind of thing

If your priority is helping the bankers, many of whom brought the country to its knees in 2008 (hello, Rishi…), then we’re never going to be friends. Moreover, I don’t want to be your friend. I can tolerate political differences to a point, but if you don’t care about small children not eating and sick people lying around in ambulances because there are no beds for them, our differences are irreconcilable  and I’d like them to remain that way, thank you very much.

Those friends you made while standing in the line, waiting to see the Queen lying in state; Kwarteng has waved a middle finger at them. For the likes of him, there is no such thing as society, collectivism doesn’t matter, just look after yourself. “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.” Yeah, that was Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, but it’s Kwarteng too, and Truss. If you have no legs, you will have to stand on your own two feet. If you have money, here, have some more.

“It’s what she would have wanted,” say people about the Queen, often jokingly, but this surely isn’t what the Queen would have wanted. If she had, I think we’d have known about it by now. She loved and believed in the United Kingdom. No own can possibly say that this government loves and believes in anything.

Already, I find myself pining for those weird days when the country was grieving. And compared to what happened with Kwarteng’s budget yesterday, it doesn’t seem quite so weird now. People showed their love for each other when the Queen died. Now we have a government that wants to trash that love.

Just when we thought things might get better, they go back to normal and now they are getting worse. I’ll never forgive Kwarteng for acting like a see you next Tuesday at the Queen’s funeral but I wish nothing but ill upon him after his disgraceful budget yesterday. I could finish by saying that we can now all see in plain sight what Brexit was all about, but we’re divided enough as it is.