TREACHERY OF THE SERPENT
EVEN in the steamiest jungles of Borneo can there be a serpent as slithering, as coiling, as Philip Hammond?
Yesterday it was reported that the Chancellor was on his mobile telephone within hours of the general election result, offering Boris Johnson help should he wish to topple Theresa May.
Hammond loathes Boris. For all we know, Boris hates him right back (and who could blame him?).
Yet in those pre-dawn hours after the election, self-serving Hammond suspected that Boris might become the new PM. Quick! Time to slither and coil! Boris, my DEAR old friend...
And so he tapped out a little come-hither text message – a 4am, electronic sibilant hiss, a nibble in the ear allegedly assuring Boris he was ‘100 per cent’ behind him if he sought the Tory leadership. Behind him with a flick-knife in hand, yeah.
In some ways we should not be surprised by this laughable plotting. Mr Hammond is the ultimate politician, driven by his own survival. Here, after all, is a man who in Opposition allowed himself to become regarded as a trenchant Eurosceptic. That suited the politics of the time.
ONCE he was in Cabinet, and once he had to keep matey with pro-Brussels David Cameron, he became a leading member of George Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’ campaign to startle voters into supporting the EU. At Westminster they call this ‘finessing your views’. Ordinary mortals would call it deceit.
In January of this year, Mr Hammond suggested that post-Brexit Britain could become a competitive, low-tax haven for employers. Good idea. It would boost the economy. Good tactics, too – it jolted the Europeans and could have created some leverage in the Brexit negotiations.
But that was when this Chancellor thought Mrs May was going to become more powerful. That was when he was wriggling for his job. Now that she has been weakened by her poor election performance – so weakened that she could not sack Mr Hammond – he has changed his tune and recently said that a lower-tax Britain was ‘neither our plan or our vision’.
Vision! How can so drab and duplicitous a figure talk of ‘vision’? The word suggests something Biblical and uplifting. Not slippery careerism.
You might have thought that, having been made Chancellor by Mrs May, this cadaverous oiler would have shown the lady some loyalty and thanks. Yet this time last year, a few months after finally landing the job he had yearned for so long, he was manoeuvering against Cabinet colleagues and Brexit. His plotting to dilute the EU referendum result has severely weakened not only Mrs May but also Britain’s chances of securing an acceptable deal from the EU.
That would suit Philip Hammond and his Treasury just fine. They could turn round and tell the referendum majority ‘we told you so’. But it would be a betrayal of the country. Mr Hammond often justifies his anti-Brexit position by claiming that ‘the people of Britain did not vote to become poorer’. Actually, they were asked a question which very clearly placed democratic self-control above the convenience of commerce. They chose the former. They chose to get out of the undemocratic EU, not least to control immigration.
Yet Mr Hammond and his Remain coplotters, from Tony Blair to George Osborne and Miss Scary Spectacles Amber Rudd, think they can tell the voters to get stuffed. Mr Hammond patronisingly claims that ‘literally no one’ wants a fall in immigration from the EU and he wants Britain to remain ‘recognisably European’.
One detail of yesterday’s reports rang a little untrue – the claim that Mr Hammond realises that he is ‘grey’ and therefore accepted that he would have to serve under Boris in an envisaged ‘triumvirate’ with David Davis.
GREY, Hammond most certainly is. But the odd thing about this most prosaic of personalities is his weird vanity. Just look at how he is forever patting the edges of his hairstyle. How he must boil with envy at Boris Johnson’s effortless elan.
Politically, Mr Hammond’s vanity can be seen in his delusional self-regard for his abilities. He really thinks he is the master strategist, the dog’s brisket. But his one Budget to date turned into a fiasco when one of its chief proposals, a change in National Insurance rates for the selfemployed, had to be quickly dumped. He had forgotten that this was in conflict with his party’s 2015 election manifesto! Had he only mentioned the National Insurance changes to Mrs May before he gave his Budget, she might have pointed that out to him. But he had kept the PM in the dark, and the voters’ trust in the Tories was damaged at a crucial time.
It is reassuring to read that Boris laughed when he read that 4am text from dullard ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ (his nickname, testament to his computeroid speed at reading financial documents). The Foreign Secretary immediately spotted that Mr Hammond was simply trying to keep his job. A man, in short, who had he been on the Titanic on the night she hit an iceberg would have barged the women and children aside in the rush for the lifeboats, demanding safe passage for himself and his tin of Cossack hairspray.