Brainbox with wheezes on everything from third class carriages to paddling pools...
TIM LEUNIG’S most controversial policy idea – until today – was to pull all Government support from ‘failed’ Northern cities and encourage the inhabitants to migrate South.
‘Barmy,’ said a furious David Cameron, who was Tory leader when Dr Leunig floated it in a think-tank report in 2008. ‘Rubbish from start to finish.’
Mr Cameron added: ‘I hear he is off to Australia. The sooner he gets on the ship, the better.’
But Dr Leunig was not planning to emigrate – and four years later he sailed into the heart of Mr Cameron’s Government as an adviser to Michael Gove.
He now holds an unusually powerful position in Whitehall, with footholds in the departments of Education, the Environment and the Treasury, where he became economic adviser to the Chancellor just weeks after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister last summer.
Mr Gove was halfway through his radical tenure as Education Secretary, waging war against the teaching establishment, when Dr Leunig joined his team alongside Dominic Cummings – Mr Gove’s most senior adviser.
Mr Cummings now performs the same de facto chief of staff role for Mr Johnson, and has extended his ideological battleground to include large swathes of the public sector and other ‘vested interests’.
Dr Leunig, 49, shares with Mr Cummings a desire for radical thinking and an apparent indifference to the objections of opponents. After attending a Kent grammar school and obtaining a First in modern history and economics at Oxford, Dr Leunig joined the London School of Economics, where he immediately started making waves with his radical brand of economic thinking.
The associate professor, a keen gardener who is married to Julia Cerutti, an Oxford contemporary and Government actuary, says that many of his ideas are inspired by frustrations in his own daily life – such as when he called for third-class, standing-only carriages on trains, for a flat fare of £1, to ease the overcrowding he experienced during his commute from Richmond in South-West London.
And when he was prevented by a hosepipe ban from filling his daughter’s paddling pool, he embarked on an analysis of the water industry which led
him to decide that the bans were a ‘crude prohibition’ which had a disproportionate impact on users. He concluded that if the water companies were given an incentive to be less wasteful, the water saved could be sold to others at a higher price, allowing him to pay extra to fill his paddling pools if he so wished.
WHILE he was working in Mr Gove’s department, as an adviser to Liberal Democrat Schools Minister David Laws, Dr Leunig also argued that more needed to be done to tackle the underachievement of the ‘dominant racial group’ – white – in schools.
He told a headteachers’ conference: ‘If your school happens to have a lot of Chinese students you are likely to do well – that is the reality. It is being white that is the problem in schools at the moment.’
His remarks coincided with the leak of a paper written by Mr Cummings, which said inherited intelligence was more important in GSCE test results than school performance.
Dr Leunig’s outspokenness is matched by fearlessness. When Mr Gove first proposed a new, highly traditional, history curriculum for schools, Dr
Leunig emailed him to say: ‘You will, personally, be mocked if you go ahead with this, and rightly so.’
Mr Gove replied: ‘Dear Tim, I am out of the UK right now – trying to broaden my horizons but in fact only expanding my waistline. Thank you for being so detailed and candid. The two things I value most in advice – and advisers – are evidence and honesty. Drawing up the curriculum has been a difficult political exercise.’
But it was Dr Leunig’s report Cities Unlimited, for the Tory-supporting Policy Exchange think-tank, which has so far gained him the most enduring notoriety.
His argument – that instead of pouring money into declining Northern cities, the Government should direct housing and industry support to London and the South where people would prefer to be based – was seized upon by Labour, which accused the Conservatives of dismissing the North as ‘worthless’.
Dr Leunig now stands accused of taking the same attitude to the entire farming industry.
But last night a friend said: ‘Tim is highly intelligent. Perhaps too intelligent for his own good sometimes’.