JAVID’S GRENADE

Ex-chancellor’s parting blast as he warns No10 against tax rises

SAJID Javid lobbed a political hand grenade at Downing Street yesterday, as he criticised the growing influence of Dominic Cummings and the danger of higher taxes.

In a pointed resignation speech in the Commons, the former chancellor warned that the merging of Treasury and No10 teams ordered by Mr Cummings would stifle debate and was ‘not in the national interest’.

Mr Javid also predicted that the Tories would wreck their reputation for economic competence and damage Britain’s public finances if a Budget spending spree resulted in higher taxes.

Mr Javid quit at this month’s reshuffle after being told he could only keep his job if he agreed to sack all of his advisers and work with a ‘joint’ team based in No10.

The ‘joint economic unit’ was seen as a power grab by Mr Cummings – the PM’s chief adviser – who had clashed repeatedly with Mr Javid’s advisers behind the scenes. Downing Street yesterday said the unit had led to ‘more effective working’ between the PM and new Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

But Mr Javid said it undermined the independence of the Treasury, with potentially damaging impacts on the Government and the economy. In an apparent reference to Mr Cummings, he warned that ‘no particular person – or even a government – has a monopoly on the best ideas’.

With the PM looking on, he said good governance depended on ‘mutual respect and trust that allows for constructive, creative tension between teams’. He added: ‘A chancellor, like all cabinet ministers, has to be able to give candid advice to a prime minister so he is speaking truth to power.

‘I believe that the arrangement proposed would significantly inhibit that and it would not have been in the national interest.’ Mr Javid paid tribute to both Boris Johnson and Mr Sunak. But, in a further jibe at the chief adviser, he said he would not comment further on the ‘Cummings and goings’ in No10.

The former chancellor also laid bare Tory tensions over tax and spending.

Describing himself as a ‘proud, low tax Conservative’, he said that ‘not everyone in the centre of Government feels the pressure to balance the books’.

He warned that the UK’s tax burden was already ‘ the highest it’s been in 50 years’ – and said it would be morally wrong for the country to live beyond its means.

‘At a time when we need to do much more to level up across the generations, it would not be right to pass the bill for our day-to-day consumption to our children and grandchildren,’ he said.

Mr Javid also warned Mr Sunak not to abandon the tight fiscal rules, which Mr Cummings is said to have railed against. He said the financial markets would take a dim view of the UK if it let the public finances run out of control again.

‘To govern is to choose,’ he added. ‘And these rules crystallise the choices required: to keep spending under control, to keep taxes low, to root out waste and to pass the litmus test, rightly set in stone in our manifesto, of debt being lower at the end of the Parliament.’

Downing Street refused to commit itself to Mr Javid’s spending rules, fuelling speculation that they will be relaxed at the Budget.

The PM’s spokesman said: ‘We will continue to have a clear fiscal framework. The detail is for the Chancellor to set out at the Budget.’ Following Mr Javid’s statement, Mr Johnson thanked him for his ‘immense service’, saying he had ‘friends and admirers on all sides’ of the Commons.

‘Speaking truth to power’