It’s JAMs today for May – but it could get sticky

CHANCELLORS and Premiers are fated to be rivals, try as they may to avoid it. One must worry perpetually about the national balance sheet. The other must fret night and day about maintaining the support of the voters. Both have the capacity to mobilise a great deal of power and to frustrate each other’s plans, if they choose.

And in times like these, the two can seldom if ever agree on what is the best thing to do. The Prime Minister has made very encouraging noises to the so-called JAMs, those ‘just about managing’ in our increasingly precarious society and who she sees as her personal constituency.

And so they are hoping for some help and encouragement from this week’s Autumn Statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond’s first chance to make his mark as a manager of the UK’s finances.

Mr Hammond has waited a long time for a job for which he is well suited. He has a powerful academic brain and considerable business experience, attributes not common in politics. And he would like to be remembered for finally getting Government borrowing under control – a target which eluded his forerunner George Osborne and which has been quietly put off since the EU referendum transformed the Cabinet.

But Mr Hammond’s freedom to act is limited by Theresa May, who has by a series of accidents become the standard bearer of the Brexit revolution and so has a surprising amount of power over her divided party and Cabinet.

She, like Mr Hammond, must fear that the process of leaving the EU may bring severe economic problems long before she has to face the voters in 2020. Her response is not to restrict spending but to keep the JAMs as happy as possible. This could take the form of jobcreating building projects, holding down fuel duty and the reversal of some cuts to Universal Credit.

Such measures are costly, which is perhaps why she has parked a small squadron of tanks on Mr Hammond’s lawn. The message for the moment is that he must not use the Treasury as a power base, as Mr Osborne did. The deeper meaning is that politics will triumph over economics in the turbulent years ahead.

That will work for just as long as Mrs May manages to stay in control of Brexit, and if she continues to be blessed with the feeblest Opposition in modern history. But if things get rough on either of these fronts, Mr Hammond – and other rivals too – will be all too ready to take revenge.