What Maggie’s £19 ironing board tells us about the chronic profligacy of today’s phoney Thatcherites

THERE was a phrase in an article jointly written by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak on Sunday that made me choke on my breakfast, and cling to the kitchen table for support.

The Prime Minister and Chancellor claimed: ‘We are Thatcherites, in the sense that we believe in sound money.’ Seldom have two leading politicians put their names to such a preposterous statement.

Margaret Thatcher believed in safeguarding taxpayers’ money. Not long after arriving at No 10 in 1979, she was so annoyed at a decision to spend £19 of public funds on a new ironing board for her official flat that she decided to pay for it herself.

This was not something that she made known at the time in order to advertise her credentials as a reliable

steward of the nation’s finances. It only came to light, along with the release of other papers, 30 years later.

Wasted

I’m certain the Iron Lady would have been shocked and bewildered by the decision of Liz Truss to use a Government private jet for a recent trip to Australia at a cost to the taxpayer of some £500,000. The Foreign Secretary could easily have taken a commercial flight. It wasn’t a particularly important meeting.

If you had told Lady Thatcher that this Government has wasted £8.7billion on personal protective equipment (PPE), in addition to the £4.3 billion lost to

coronavirus support loan scams, I don’t suppose she would have believed you.

That is £13 billion down the drain — which happens to be one billion pounds

more than the £12billion the Government intends to extract from us by raising National Insurance in April.

It’s very serious money, this £12billion tax increase. It will impose an average annual bill of £600 on ordinary working families at the same time as they are grappling with runaway inflation, and rocketing gas and electricity prices.

The loss of £13 billion is a huge scandal, though you wouldn’t think so judging by the uncontrite reaction of ministers. Neither Rishi Sunak nor Boris Johnson has apologised. Michael Gove assured us smoothly on the BBC yesterday that there was a ‘global race to secure PPE’ and ‘everyone appreciates the context’.

In other words, according to Mr Gove, it was a case of all hands to the pump at the beginning of a major crisis, and we shouldn’t be too surprised that £8.7billion went AWOL. This is a wrong-headed excusing of ministerial and civil service incompetence.

Whitehall was unquestionably under enormous pressure, having made virtually no preparations for a pandemic. Even so, can there be any defence for spending £155million on supposedly high-quality face masks that were never distributed because they had ear loops rather than head loops, and so were unlikely to fit tightly enough?

Was it prudent to splash out £70 million on 10 million gowns — ordered, incidentally, from a jewellery designer in Miami — which were withdrawn on safety grounds because our officials had put the wrong packaging specifications on the contract?

Somehow, I can’t imagine Tesco or Marks & Spencer being so spendthrift. But then private businesses look after their own money whereas civil servants make free with ours — and are never asked to pay for their mistakes with their jobs.

Rishi Sunak can hardly be held personally responsible for the PPE fiasco, but he is accountable for the £4.3 billion lost on loan scams. Last week, Lord Agnew, the anti-fraud minister, resigned at the despatch box in protest at ‘woeful’ attempts to stop public money being stolen during the pandemic.

As Lord Agnew threw in the towel — an honourable man in a Government not famed for its sense of honour — he suggested that the £4.3 billion is part of ‘rampant’ fraud which mushroomed during the pandemic, and is costing some £29 billion a year.

He said income tax could be cut by a penny if ministers got to grips with the problem. But there seems very little prospect of that happening because of ‘a combination of arrogance, indolence and ignorance [that] freezes the Government machine’.

Here, then, is an administration that seems remarkably relaxed about the huge sums of public money it has mislaid, and is shamefully reluctant to express even the mildest regret or apology.

Carelessness, it seems, has not merely led to a profusion of lockdown-busting parties at No 10. It has somehow spread to the casual way in which ministers regard stupendous losses of taxpayers’ money. Apart from Lord Agnew, some backbench Tory MPs and, of course, the Opposition, no one seems to mind very much.

And yet this Government, so free and easy in this case, is grimly insisting that the £12 billion increase in National Insurance must go ahead in April because of the supposedly precarious state of the public finances.

Soaring

Granted, the wasting of £13 billion is not justification for withholding the rise in National Insurance. They are separate issues. But postponing or cancelling the increase is affordable, principally because current Government borrowing is £13billion less than was officially predicted at the time of the Budget last October.

However, if the public finances look sunnier than a few months ago, people’s personal finances look decidedly darker because inflation is going up more quickly than the Bank of England predicted, and energy costs are soaring. Come April, they will really bite, despite reported £200 handouts to many households.

A sensible, pragmatic Government would surely acknowledge that circumstances have changed, and embrace the opportunity provided by the £13 billion improvement in the public finances to defer the tax increase.

Why doesn’t it? Some may be convinced by the argument made by the Prime Minister and Chancellor in their joint letter that it is advisable to take the pain now. In describing themselves — rather laughably in the circumstances — as ‘tax-cutting Conservatives’, they hint at tax reductions in the future.

Grab

Here’s the rub, though. A Cabinet minister explained to me that if there is a tax increase now, there can be a cut in 18 months’ time to soften up voters before an election. But if the tax grab is put off, there won’t be enough time for an electionwinning sweetener.

This calculation may be correct. But I think it’s probably wrong. Isn’t it likely that a severe cost of living crisis this year will damage the Tories’ electoral prospects, possibly irrevocably, so that a last-minute giveaway becomes utterly ineffective?

Boris evidently sees the advantages of postponing April’s increase more acutely than Rishi. But weakened as he is by the idiocies of the scandal over parties, he is unable to follow his instincts.

So we have a Government that has managed to throw away £13 billion and yet clings to an unnecessary tax hike that will lead to hardship, and probably further depress the Tories’ flagging electoral fortunes.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have the nerve to describe themselves as Thatcherites. If they really were, they wouldn’t have rashly allowed £13billion to be written off as it has been, and be showing so few signs of contrition.

And if they really were the Thatcherites they declare themselves to be, they would call off their wretched tax increase, to the benefit of the Tory Party and for the good of the nation.