The deficit used to be wielded like a Tory club, now it’s a fiscal taboo

Here’s a blast from the past for you. The deficit. Remember that? Whatever happened to it? We hardly ever hear about it these days. Yet, just a few short years ago, it was all the rage. The deficit, it seems now, was like the Atkins diet, or Kabbalah, or Russell Brand. For a while, it’s all anyone can talk about. The hottest topic in town. Then abruptly, it falls out of fashion, and in no time at all is forgotten.

Just to refresh our memories…what was the deficit, again? Ah yes: the gulf between the amount of money that the Government spends and the amount of money it brings in. Anyway: for many years – to be precise, from late 2008 until summer 2016 – the deficit was extremely important. Certainly to David Cameron and George Osborne, and the electoral prospects of the Tory party.

Because although people didn’t necessarily know what the deficit was – including, it sometimes seemed, Mr Cameron, who had a habit of mixing it up with the national debt – they knew it sounded big and scary. Big and scary enough to persuade enough of them to support Mr Osborne’s cuts, and vote Tory in 2015. Which is why Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne used to bang on about the deficit all the time.

They wielded it against Labour like a club. Yet the moment the pair scuttled from office, the Government stopped talking about it. Theresa May, in particular. However, this, for the Tories, is a problem – as we were reminded yesterday at PMQS. Beard bristling with impatience, Jeremy Corbyn asked Mrs May the same question six times. When, he snapped, would austerity end? For nurses? For the police? For teachers, councils, benefits claimants?

We know how Mr Cameron would have replied. He would have thundered, with jeering panache, about the deficit, and the urgent need to reduce it further. Mrs May, however, did not. She didn’t mention the deficit. Indeed, she gave scant justification for the eight years of cuts her party had overseen – and then bleated feebly that “better times” were “ahead”. Her MPS sat in awkward silence. Any voter watching couldn’t have been blamed for asking, “So what was the point of all those cuts, then? And why shouldn’t we have the free stuff this Corbyn bloke’s promising?”

Towards the end of PMQS, Mrs May finally did mention the deficit – but only under duress. Ronnie Campbell (Lab, Blyth Valley) had just asked her how high the national debt was.

“What we have seen,” said Mrs May hastily, “is a reduction in our deficit of three quarters!” So that’s how you get Mrs May to talk about the deficit. Ask her about something she wants to talk about even less.

The national debt, incidentally, is £1.78 trillion. Despite Mr Campbell helpfully waving a piece of paper with the figure written on it, Mrs May forgot to say so.