Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones?

Markets certainly like the Anglo-India trade deal announced by the government on Tuesday. Sterling is up sharply against the euro and the dollar, signalling that investors are feeling positive about the prospects for a freer-trade Britain. Car manufacturers and the Scotch Whisky Association are pretty pleased, too, given that it means the end of punitive – indeed, positively Trumpian – tariffs on UK exports to India.

So why, then, have the Conservatives received the news so sourly? One by one, they have come out to condemn the government for its negotiations. According to shadow business minister Harriet Baldwin, the deal will be ‘subsidising Indian labour while undercutting British workers’. Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith writes on X: ‘Every time Labour negotiates, Britain loses.’ Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have weighed in, too, picking up on one detail of the deal: a double taxation treaty which will mean that Indian workers in Britain will not pay National Insurance contributions for the first three years working in the UK – and vice versa for British workers in India. This is very similar to the double taxation arrangements we already have with EU countries as well as with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and is necessary to prevent workers paying tax twice. Indian workers coming to Britain will still have to pay an NHS surcharge, mind, and they will remain subject to salary thresholds to ensure that low-skilled, low-paid Indian workers do not flood the UK jobs market.

How bizarre that Conservative MPs have such a problem with a double taxation treaty when many of them have been in uproar against the withdrawal of non-dom status, which is vastly more generous to foreign nationals resident in Britain (not necessarily even working). Make your minds up, for goodness’ sake: are high-earning foreign nationals an asset to Britain or not? The problem with migration is of the illegal variety – with criminals and terrorists abusing the asylum system – and with the mass, uncontrolled migration of low-skilled workers which came with EU free movement. Instead, the Tories are still doing as they did in office: lashing out at high-value migrants because of their impotence at controlling the illegals.

I don’t think the Conservatives are nearly so doomed as many people think they are. Reform’s drift to the left – nationalisation and all – presents them with an opportunity to be the only party making the case for free-market economics. That might not seem an obvious political advantage at the moment, when the public seems to have turned against economic liberalism, but it will become more so as the UK’s public finances continue to deteriorate towards national bankruptcy. Stagnant growth is failing to bail us out; borrowing in the past 12 months has approached the monstrous deficit left behind by Gordon Brown, and without a global recession as an excuse.

Sooner or later – and quite possibly sooner rather than later – global bond investors are going to do what they have threatened to do several times in recent years: lose all faith in the UK government’s ability to repay its debts. That may well necessitate an emergency loan from the IMF or somewhere – and a sharp contraction in UK public spending and the size of the state.

But if the Tories want to benefit from the approaching fiscal crisis, they need to be making the case for free markets now, not trying to oppose everything the government does just for the sake of it. They should be doing as the markets are in response to the India free trade deal: welcoming it – and adding that this is the fruit of Brexit, a Brexit which every single member of cabinet opposed, indeed, even tried to reverse. They should be ramming it home: we, the Conservatives, started negotiations for this trade deal. It is a Conservative achievement – although credit where it is due to the government for finally embracing Brexit and seeing it through.

That is what would earn them respect, not the mean-minded reaction we have heard from them today.