Liz Truss is now prime minister in name only: Jeremy Hunt, her chancellor of the exchequer, now holds power. He has repudiated her tax-cutting mini-Budget in a round of media appearances – his performances being far more convincing than Truss’s graceless eight-minute press conference on Friday. His admission that spending cuts will be needed and that ‘some taxes are going to go up’ to balance the books has injected a much-needed dose of realism.

The question on everyone’s lips is: what will Hunt do now? Is he a stalking horse for a new PM (Rishi Sunak being the obvious candidate) or is the former head boy at Charterhouse himself a prime minister-in-waiting?

Let’s look at the options. Even a deeply divided Tory party should be able to see that the Truss project – whether you liked or hated it – is now dead in the water. But they need to pull together around something. Can Tory MPs bury their differences and rally around a unity candidate? The job would be to see the country through the market squalls into a general election, possibly as early as next year.

Hunt is an obvious choice, given that he has already started the repair work. He is now working on a medium-term financial strategy at the Treasury and operating in tandem with Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, to make the numbers add up to the satisfaction of a newly-empowered Office of Budget Responsibility.

Each of these institutions – the Bank, the Treasury and the OBR – were treated with disdain by Truss and Kwarteng. Indeed, the disagreement between Bailey and Kwarteng over who was responsible for ructions in the bond market and the knock-on impact on pension funds may well have settled the latter’s fate.

The Bank was sensitive to Tory criticism that it had been too timid in raising interest rates – it blamed the abrupt increase in gilt yields on the government’s mini-Budget. But Kwarteng and Truss (aided and abetted by Jacob Rees-Mogg) disagreed. The row did a fair bit to undermine investor confidence in the stewardship of the UK economy.

Jeremy Hunt is the proverbial safe pair of hands. He ran as the self-styled ‘sensible candidate’ in the 2019 leadership race to succeed Theresa May but his Remain credentials did for him in the end – and he lost decisively to Boris Johnson. Now he is both in office and in power. He wouldn’t ever have agreed to take on the chancellorship (the most thankless job in government) without extracting terms. He will have insisted on picking his own team, and on being given a free hand to reverse the brief, ill-fated Truss-Kwarteng trickle-down economics experiment.

The cabinet ousted Boris Johnson, but don’t expect the cabinet to depose Liz Truss, who picked her ministers based on fealty to her rather than competence. So everything comes down to the parliamentary party. Crispin Blunt has today become the first backbencher to call for her to go but there have so far been no others. The 1922 committee no longer enjoys its fearsome reputation, irrespective of what you may make of Sir Graham Brady (who is returning from holiday in Greece this weekend).

MPs will be moved by two factors: the financial markets (which are pushing up the cost of borrowing) and the polls which currently show a 27-point Labour party lead.

Sir Roger Gale, the perennial Tory party rebel in recent years, told LBC that a period of calm under Truss-Hunt leadership may save her – at least in the short term. This may well be wishful thinking.

Hunt is a man who cares about the national interest, but he is not lacking in ambition. Sunak has been proved right about ‘fairy tale economics’ but having moved against Johnson, he may worry about wielding the knife again – or standing and losing again. This offers an opening to Hunt (assuming there is no deal between the two men).

During the 2019 leadership election campaign, I had breakfast with Hunt (then foreign secretary) at the Corinthia hotel. He arrived with a Union Jack badge in his left lapel and not a hair out of place. At the time, sensing he was losing to Johnson, Hunt told me that ‘being boring and technocratic does not work’.

Well, boring does it for me. And, I suspect, for much of the rest of the country. So hold on Sir Keir Starmer: Jeremy Hunt’s time might just have come.