the times | Thursday November 25 2021 35
Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Don’t fall for Sunak’s leader-in-waiting spin
The Treasury peddles the line that it is better run than No 10 but the chancellor’s tax moves have cost him credibility
GDP ratio (higher than Germany,
below France, but nothing like
wartime levels) is the excuse for
those counterproductive, anti-growth
tax rises.
Some tension over economic policy
between a prime minister and
chancellor is perfectly normal and can
even be healthy. Part of a chancellor’s
job is to provide a counterweight to
the prime minister. In this way,
Brown’s team genuinely didn’t want
Britain to join the euro, because they
regarded it as an economic mistake.
Thank goodness they prevailed.
Sometimes, for a few years, the
stars align and a prime minister and
chancellor work in harmony
pursuing a programme of reforms.
Margaret Thatcher and Nigel
Lawson had such a relationship, until
they fell out over European
integration and No 10 sought more
control of economic policy.
What we have now is a new kind
of dysfunction, a briefing war that is
primarily about personal ambition.
Meanwhile the country drifts
without a coherent plan for how to
make the economy grow faster and
improve productivity post-Brexit, the
only way to generate prosperity.
The prime minister’s door is
ultimately where that buck stops. But
the country’s economic policy is
confused and wrong-headed because
Sunak and the Treasury are making
it so.bonanza? Then, in a strange coda, he
all but renounced his own
programme, kicking away its
intellectual underpinning by
stressing that he personally is for low
taxes and sensible spending.
There have been Treasury
successes under Sunak. The furlough
policy of paying wages as an
emergency measure during the
pandemic was a triumph, although it
had widespread support across
Whitehall and in the country.
It should also be noted that it was
managed by Jesse Norman, the
financial secretary to the Treasury,
who for his troubles was flung
overboard in the reshuffle. The
prime minister didn’t appear to know
what his old friend did; the
chancellor acquiesced in his removal.
Incidentally, Norman is married to
Dame Kate Bingham, vaccine hero
and critic this week of civil service
groupthink.
The innovation of the pandemic
period has not been matched in the
aftermath. Assorted attempts have
been made by former chancellors,
cabinet ministers and economists of
no party to persuade the Treasury
that the Covid debt should be treated
not just as standard borrowing and
piled on to the national debt, but
dealt with as a one-off disaster by
designing long-term pandemic
bonds and debt. This has been
rejected and the national debt tokeen on the rise in national
insurance that takes effect next
April, he has told friends. But the
Treasury kept on about it and
insisted taxes go up to reassure the
markets about the soundness of
Britain’s fiscal management.
In return for going along with this
daft policy the prime minister now
finds himself briefed against from
inside Downing Street, when it is
Sunak’s Treasury that has got the
government and the country into
such a terrible twist. After bouncing
back from the pandemic, Britain isset to combine higher taxes with
higher inflation and higher interest
rates. That is a recipe for a potential
recession and we will all be lucky to
avoid it.
As the main economic department
the Treasury deserves much of the
blame for the difficulties we face
going into winter. The chancellor
combines strategic weakness with a
needy obsession with public relations
designed to obscure that fact.
How else to explain the bizarre
budget last month in which Sunak
spent the first four fifths of it
announcing an epic spendingF
or connoisseurs of tensions
between No 10 and No 11,
the latest Downing Street
episode is a corker. The
prime minister’s team is
hunting a leaker, christened “the
chatty pig” in light of Boris Johnson
losing the plot and wittering on
about a children’s TV character in a
speech to the CBI on Monday.
No 11 denies that its people trashed
Johnson but it is reported the
Treasury is in a state approaching
despair about his ramshackle style.
The worst-kept secret in London is
that you merely have to offer Rishi
Sunak a bread roll and a can of Coke
Zero and he will explain how it is
only his valiant department that is
holding everything together in this
strange administration.
The tensions over policy and
personnel may not yet be as serious
as they were during the worst of the
psychodrama involving Tony Blair
and Gordon Brown. They’re pretty
bad though, and it is crystal clear
what Team Rishi is up to. The
Treasury is presenting itself as the
sensible, knowing, orderly
establishment department run by the
prime-minister-in-waiting, in contrast
to the shambolic operation at No 10.
I’m not swallowing that spin. A
large dose of scepticism is required,
given that the chancellor is far from
confident of his position and the
department he runs is implicated in
ill-judged tax rises and numerous
dubious policies.
If Sunak’s hope is that he will
ascend from the ashes of the
Johnson administration with a
reputation for sound economic
management and ideological
sure-footedness, he may be destined
for disappointment. He has created
consternation and anger by playing
too many games to be credible,
principally as the tax-raiser and
high-spender who presents himself
as being in favour of low taxation
and restraint.
A Tory donor told me this week:
“If Rishi wants to be Tory leader he
should have resigned ages ago. He is
damned now as a high spender who
didn’t stand up to Boris.” In one
respect, the chancellor did stand up
to the prime minister; unfortunately
it was to demand and get tax rises
announced in September
The behaviour of Sunak’s team
baffles the prime minister, I’m told,
particularly when the two sets of
advisers are supposed to be
operating as one. Johnson was notThe country is drifting
without a coherent
plan for the economy
Iain
Martin@iainmartin1