What would happen if Gove was the chancellor?

To succeed at the Treasury he would have to convince its experts that Brexit and tax cuts can be beneficial

It is just as well Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has such a low opinion of “experts”, for his upper second class degree in English wouldn’t immediately seem to qualify him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he is said increasingly to hanker after. According to reports, he’s of late taken to using a lot of economic jargon in Cabinet meetings, and made a number of lengthy interventions on things not obviously in his remit, including “industrial strategy” and the “Markets in Financial Instruments Directive”, the sort of unfathomable EU legislation Eurosceptics so much love to hate.

With the incumbent, Philip Hammond, struggling to deliver a Budget that will both inspire the party and reinvigorate the economy, some see it as deliberate auditioning for the Chancellor’s job. We know not precisely what economic gobbledegook Mr Gove has been spouting, but if he’s minded to take on the language of those despised experts, here are a few suggestions.

As a first rule of thumb, never use one word where six will do. Britain’s shamefully low levels of business investment should therefore correctly be referred to as a “deficit in gross new capital formation”. With post-brexit trade opportunities in mind, Mr Gove might constructively start bandying around the law of “comparative advantage”, sometimes described as one of the most powerful and counterintuitive ideas in economics. To really impress colleagues, he could express it thus: ALC/A’LC < ALW/A’LW. No matter that this only partially describes the concept, nobody’s going to know.

You don’t, of course, need to be an economist to become chancellor, or to excel in the job. Of the last 10, only one, Norman Lamont, was obviously qualified, having studied economics at Cambridge. An Oxford degree in politics, philosophy and economics (Anthony Barber and Nigel Lawson) doesn’t count. Of the rest, it was a mixture of history, law, classics, and in John Major’s case, nothing at all; he never went to university.

Nor indeed did Winston Churchill, who reputedly said: “Everybody said that I was the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever was. And I’m inclined to agree with them. So now the world’s unanimous.” Therein lies some encouragement for Mr Gove, for the calamity that marked Churchill’s time as chancellor was a return to the Gold Standard. Churchill’s instinct was against it, but he was convinced by his “experts”, in particular Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England. It turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes in his career, helping to generate a wholly unnecessary depression. “I wish [Montagu Norman, Philip Snowden and the monetary experts] were admirals or generals,” he told Robert Boothby in 1924. “I can sink them if necessary. But when I am talking to bankers and economists, after a while they begin to talk Persian, and then they sink me instead.”

Mr Gove’s participation in the referendum and its immediate aftermath will be remembered primarily for two things; his treachery and his dismissal of “the experts”, by which he meant primarily HM Treasury analysis which argued that Brexit would have a deeply negative impact on the economy. He now proposes to sit atop this supposed nest of useless economic expertise. But to do so, he must plan his assault, much as Gordon Brown and his henchmen did when they arrived in government 20 years ago. Sensing that the Treasury would attempt to stifle their economic radicalism, they staged what they thought of as a kind of coup d’etat, announcing their policies as a fait accompli before the mandarins had any opportunity to say quite how unwise they would be.

Today, Mr Gove would be confronted by a Treasury which institutionally thinks Brexit an extremely bad idea, and is determined to engineer as soft a departure as possible. He would also inherit a department locked into the austerity agenda of fiscal consolidation, and therefore unwilling to sanction anything of any significance carrying an upfront cost. Your mission, Michael, should you choose to accept it – there is no doubt, of course, about the answer – would be to ensure that the Treasury prepares for a no-deal Brexit, provides the money for it, and goes for broke on the kind of radical tax overhaul we see Donald Trump attempting in the US. We won’t see those moves from the incumbent.

The present mindset, on the economy and Brexit, is one of damage limitation. To succeed, Mr Gove must demolish this thinking and convince that Brexit can both be economically beneficial and that the public finances can be improved by tax cutting.

Would that it was as simple as a Mission Impossible film, where one way or another, Ethan Hunt always succeeds. For though the Treasury often gets its economic forecasting wrong, one thing it is quite expert at – an understanding honed by centuries of experience – is knowing that economic stability is a far more precious commodity than any amount of radicalism. Upsetting the apple cart is simply not what the Treasury is about. So good luck with those experts, Mr Gove.