What the blue blistering blazes was Rishi Sunak thinking? What possessed him to call an early election? Look at what has happened in the three months since.

Our economy has handsomely outperformed comparable European states. On the latest figures, we are fastest-growing country in the G7 this year. Indeed, in the quarter just ended, growth in the UK was twice what it was in the EU.

Inflation has dropped, and is hovering around its 2 per cent target. The S&P Global Business Outlook Survey finds British firms more optimistic than any other major countries, and vastly more so than their French or German rivals.

Oh, and by the way, exam results have finally recovered to pre-lockdown levels, NHS waiting lists are set to drop and, four weeks ago, the British Border Force returned 71 Channel migrants to Calais for the first time, while legal immigration is down by a third, as the Tories’ crackdowns on student visas and family reunification rules take effect.

It is possible that none of these things would have made a difference. Perhaps the Conservative decline was impervious to data. Perhaps voters had stopped listening. But it is hard to see how the election result could have been much worse.

The economic statistics are worth pondering, because they call into question Labour’s opening assumption, the basis on which it has constructed its economic policy. Sir Keir Starmer starts from the conviction that the British economy has been wrecked by Eurosceptics and libertarians. But what if he is wrong? What if we are holding up pretty well against comparable countries? What if our problems have to do with an excessive lockdown, an engorged state and a needlessly expensive energy policy? If the patient has been misdiagnosed, the treatment might do more harm than good.

Labour’s charge that “Liz Truss crashed the economy” began life as a slogan. No one seriously thought that lasting economic damage could be done by, so to speak, a subjunctive budget, a budget whose clauses were never implemented. But ministers have rattled out those syllables so often that they have started to believe the accusation themselves.

They have also internalised the idea that Brexit has done deep damage.

The figure that Rejoiners love to quote is that our GDP will be smaller than it would have been by 4 to 6 per cent. That estimate originated in a Treasury paper before the vote. One way of assessing its reliability is to look at what else the Treasury said would happen. It predicted an instant recession in the second half of 2016 but, in the event, the UK ended that year as the world’s best performing major economy. It prophesied that unemployment would rise by 9,000 a month, but unemployment instead fell by almost exactly that amount. It said there would need to be an emergency budget to plug a £19 billion gap – the same number Rachel Reeves was claiming as her black hole, almost as if Treasury officials keep it in a drawer. Obviously, no such budget was needed.

If the Treasury’s short-term forecasts about Brexit have been shown up as biased, why treat its long-term forecast as impartial?

The awkward fact for pro-Brussels irreconcilables is that, since the vote, the UK has grown faster than the eurozone. Whatever problems we have faced – and there have been plenty – they have hit our European friends too. Euro-zealots fall back on the argument that, although the UK has outperformed most EU economies, it would have done even better had it voted to stay. But any thesis that depends on extrapolating from our growth rate between 2011 and 2016 – that is, our bounce-back from the global financial crisis – should be dismissed as unserious.

Outperforming the eurozone is not a high bar.

Our allies in Europe were affected, just as we were, by the cost of lockdown and by the spike in energy prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

My point is that we are misdiagnosing the problem. If Brexit had been the disaster Labour believes, we would not be outgrowing the eurozone. And if the Tories really had turned Britain into some kind of low-tax Dickensian sweatshop, we would not have the highest tax levels since the aftermath of the Second World War.

Our real problem is that, instead of allowing spending to fall back to where it was when the lockdown began, we have accepted a much larger state, and have pushed up taxes and borrowing commensurately. According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, our national debt now stands at £2.5 trillion, and is rising by £382 million a day.

This is the background against which Labour has decided to give massive pay rises to public sector workers while simultaneously hiring more of them. Civil service numbers have already increased by nearly a quarter since 2016. A Brexit bump, as jobs previously done in Brussels were repatriated, was followed by a pandemic bump, as people were hired to deal with procurement, testing and vaccination. With both those out of the way, the plan was for numbers to fall by 66,000. Instead, Labour will make the supposedly temporary increases permanent. At the same time, it is handing over money unconditionally to government workers – “unconditionally” being the key word. Unlike in the private sector, where productivity is well ahead of where it was pre-pandemic, it is still down by 7 per cent among working-from-home state employees.

If your first act is to give doctors a 22 per cent pay rise, and you don’t make it dependent on any changes in working patterns, you can forget about ending Zoom consultations or eliminating waiting lists. Aslef train drivers are now boasting that they have got their inflation-busting pay rises “with no strings attached”. So they keep, among other things, the right to paid time off if they are in contact with a microwave oven. Unsurprisingly, other unions have decided to chance their arm, with staff on the LNER line walking out and border officials striking.

How steeped in redistributive dogma do you have to be to imagine that public-sector pay rises, without any pretence of investment in anything else, will of themselves make the country wealthier?

Or, indeed, to believe that pushing up energy costs in pursuit of a decarbonised grid by 2030 will not mean knock-on price rises for everything else?

Or that Angela Rayner’s package of workers’ rights can somehow be implemented without pushing up costs to businesses, which must then be passed on to their customers – often the same people as their employees?

And where, by the way, is the OBR assessment of the impact of all this extra spending? Having huffed and puffed about the Truss budget, surely Labour will want to publish an independent forecast?

If Starmer is unwilling to cut spending, his only other option is to go all-out for growth.

Remove taxes that bring in little revenue but depress economic activity, notably taxes on savings and inheritance. Let wealthy foreigners live here for an annual fee. Move to a European-style healthcare system. Make labour laws more flexible. Crack down on sicknotes. Abolish the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Scrap checks on goods from the EU, which can hardly have become suddenly dangerous after 50 years of being imported without inspections. Deregulate childcare.

Of course, simply to list these things is to see that Starmer will never implement them.

Labour has come to believe its own propaganda, convincing itself that Truss’s attempt to stimulate growth – measures, to repeat, that were never implemented – “crashed the economy”. And so it is spooning out more of the medicine that sickened the patient: higher spending, a bigger public sector, more EU-style regulation.

Look at today’s growth figures. Remember them. Because we are about to see what crashing the economy actually looks like.