Liz Truss gripped the box like Barry Sheene on his bike
TREASURY Questions happened yesterday morning. What was surprising, after the recent BBC propaganda blitz, was how easily Philip Hammond and his Treasury ministers saw off their opponents.
On the core issue of tax and spend, Labour was not at the races. You don’t get much taste of that balance of the arguments on the airwaves at present.
The recent media hoo-hah has been about the public- sector pay cap and about Mr Hammond practically having punch-ups with Cabinet colleagues over Brexit. Yet the Hammond who came to the House at 11.30am seemed relaxed. He is either a better actor than most give him credit for, or those stories about Cabinet rows have been oversold.
He and his ministers were also solid in defending the principles of fiscal caution. More money, more money, yelled Labour. Ministers: Nope, because that would just add to the national debt. It’s not a hard argument to explain.
Peter Dowd, a genially partisan Labour frontbencher (he has a habit of pushing his spectacles up his nose like Eric Morecambe), hurled himself into an overscripted attack. It called Mr Hammond ‘this feeble Chancellor’ and referred to Theresa May as ‘the woman in the bunker’. There was more from Mr Dowd about how he hoped May and Hammond would soon leave Downing Street in the same removals lorry. No doubt it all sounded terrific in his morning bath.
When Mr Dowd has been in the Commons a few months longer he will see that despatch- box ya- booery is no substitute for brisk, factual interrogation.
The ruder you are, the more you embarrass yourself. The only exception to this is when the House is packed and noisy; yesterday it was half-full and Mr Dowd’s barbs fell on silence. Short, detailed questions are what ministers fear.
Mr Hammond wandered to the despatch box and murmured: ‘I don’t feel particularly enfeebled.’
He proceeded to make, time and again, the argument that more borrowing is not the solution to our debt problem.
The only way to reduce debt is by lowering (and preferably wiping out altogether) the annual deficit. At present – as a result, said Mr Hammond, of ‘Labour’s recession’ – we pay more on servicing our debt than we do on both the Armed Forces and the police.
Kwasi Kwarteng, Mr Hammond’s new parliamentary private secretary, had been busy.
Tory backbenchers had been primed to ask supportive questions. Mr Hammond does not yet quite have the sort of groupies who used to suck up to George Osborne but the threat of Corbynist socialism is real enough to have encouraged Conservative MPs to repeat Treasury-scripted statistics about the economy.
LIz Truss, the new Treasury Chief Secretary, took the first question and she was immediately pressed by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell about public- sector wages, which he felt should be raised. Miss Truss saw off this argument with a battery of squawked replies.
Miss Truss has become a more tense specimen at the despatch box since the general election but she was effective in a vinegary way yesterday, repeatedly arguing that plenty of public- sector workers last year received pay rises well above 1 per cent.
Time and again she told Labour MPs to ‘get their facts straight’. As she did so, she gripped the sides of the despatch box and leaned slightly, like the late Barry Sheene going round a corner on his motorbike. Her vocal tone was harsh on the ears but it generally did the trick. Mr Hammond’s other new ministers are: former Transport minister Andrew Jones, almost comically unshowy and a ringer for actor Peter Graves in the original Mission: Impossible episodes; Mel Stride, a former Whip who ran his own business for 20 years; Steve Barclay, a former soldier and City lawyer, clever and not afraid to be blunt. Mr Hammond may not be naturally collegiate but he has one of the stronger ministerial teams in Whitehall. And although he may be irritatingly obstructive on Brexit matters, it is hard to see him being budged.