FISCAL PHIL: Corbyn in power? It’d be like turning off Britain’s lights
And I did NOT switch allegiance to ‘PM’ Boris with a 4am text!
PHILIP HAMMOND is sitting in No 11 Downing Street beneath a Cubist painting by CRW Nevinson, best known for bleak portrayals of the First World War inspired by his traumatic experience of treating wounded soldiers.
If the Chancellor is to be believed, Britain’s industrial landscape would be left in a bleak condition if Jeremy Corbyn got into power.
‘It would be like a switch turning off the lights in Britain,’ he declares, echoing the famous Sun newspaper headline when Neil Kinnock seemed to be on the verge of winning the 1992 Election.
Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell pose an even greater threat to the economy, says Mr Hammond. ‘They want Marxist solutions that don’t work. They are a clear and present danger.’
Our interview with the Chancellor on Friday came two days after Corbyn appeared to use the Labour conference to rehabilitate the long-discredited economics of pre-Thatcher 1970s Britain.
Normally mild-mannered, Mr Hammond watched Corbyn’s speech on television spluttering with rage and indignation. ‘To delude a new generation with the fantasy that we can solve these problems with the tired, hackneyed answers of the 1970s is a cynical delusion.’
When Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson won his second election in 1974, 18-year-old Essex boy Hammond was on his first day at Oxford University and watched it on TV in the Junior Common Room.
‘Britain was grim, a miserable, desolate sort of place,’ he says. ‘Everything was going wrong. We were slipping behind – losing the race, far behind our European neighbours – and we knew it.’
Voters fooled by Corbyn into thinking they would be better off with a return to 1970s-style Labour socialism need a wakeup call, he says. Inflation was 29 per cent in Wilson’s Britain – ‘29 per cent!’ he repeats – and would be even higher in Corbyn’s Britain. Another grim fact is that Mr Hammond bears some of the blame for the Election fiasco: Tory MPs say he was among those who urged timid Theresa to do it. Mr Hammond won’t say but stresses he had nothing to with the ‘dementia tax’ fiasco.
‘To drop something like that into a manifesto, launched without any sort of preparation of public opinion, was a mistake.’ So why do it? ‘I can’t answer that. I wasn’t in control of the process,’ he replies pointedly, a coded reference to Mrs May’s powerful former chief of staff Nick Timothy.
Timothy reputedly called Hammond a ‘****’ and Hammond – or one of his aides – is said to
Corbyn and his Marxist solutions are a clear danger
have regarded Timothy as ‘economically illiterate.’ Hammond says his relations with Mrs May have been transformed since the Election. ‘She has changed the way she operates her office, is more accessible to colleagues, more engaged – an altogether better way of doing government.’ He means she fired Timothy, whom he loathed. Hammond replies with deadly understatement: ‘That was not a symmetrical relationship: I was largely indifferent to Nick Timothy; he apparently wasn’t that keen on me.’ Ouch. Hammond’s allies say he blamed Timothy for keeping him on the sidelines during the Election campaign. ‘We did not argue the strengths of our economy or make the case,’ he protests.
The Tories may have dropped the ‘dementia tax’ like a hot brick in the Election. But, according to Hammond, it cannot be ignored for ever.
‘We cannot give unconditional support to a relatively wealthy older generation at the expense of a younger generation increasingly excluded from asset ownership.’ But it had to be done in a less ‘threatening’ way that did not cause panic – as the manifesto ‘dementia tax’ bombshell did.
With Mr Timothy out of the way, most of Mr Hammond’s Tory tussles have been with Boris Johnson over Brexit. Hammond favours a ‘soft Brexit’ with a flexible transition. Johnson wants a ‘hard Brexit’ with a two-year maximum transition.
The rift flared last week with a claim in the Sunday Times that Mr Hammond texted Mr Johnson at 4am on Election night offering to support him for the Tory leadership in return for remaining Chancellor when it appeared Mrs May could be forced to resign.
Mr Hammond says it is not true and suggests the account was a distortion. ‘I do not recognise the words, or indeed the sentiment, that I saw written in the Sunday Times. When you read the article carefully, it didn’t say, “The text said 100 per cent behind you’”. Instead, it reads, “Boris said I’ve had a text from Phil Hammond – he’s 100 per cent behind me” – not quoting me, but interpreting me.’
He was indignant not just because it was false to suggest he would ever plot against Mrs May.
‘I’d go further than that: it’s completely against my character to write down anything like that. I do not write people texts of that description.’
Our interview took place hours before Mr Johnson fired another ‘hard Brexit’ broadside in the direction of Mrs May and Mr Hammond, stating the transition period from the UK’s formal exit in March 2019 must not last ‘a
We did not argue the strengths of our economy
second longer than two years.’ Mr Hammond said: ‘The PM has said around two years and I’m happy with that. I’ve previously suggested that it could have been up to three years.’ That is a lot of extra seconds. Mr Hammond also derides claims by some of those close to Boris that his explosive ‘hard Brexit’ transition demand two weeks ago in a 4,000-word newspaper article forced Mrs May to take a tougher line in her keynote speech in Florence.
‘I’d been engaged in the discussions with her over months and know how her thinking was evolving. These are not just random thoughts, “Let’s go down this route.”’
Translation: Boris makes a lot of noise, but I’m the one with the PM’s ear.
In what may be interpreted as another jibe at charismatic Mr Johnson, Mr Hammond said he was ‘happy being Chancellor’ and was not ‘on a personal ego trip.’
Mr Hammond, 61, ruled himself out of any Tory leadership challenge long ago. But he repeatedly declined to say he would back Mr Johnson – or any other potential candidate – for the post if Mrs May goes.
Put on the spot over Mrs May’s prospects, Mr Hammond is circumspect. She has his ‘complete support’ and is ‘doing a good job in a very difficult set of circumstances’. But he adds: ‘She has said that she intends to fight the next Election, and if that’s what she does, I will back her.’
There is no hint of disloyalty, but he is too honest to pretend she will lead the Tories into the next Election, due in 2022.
Mr Hammond’s ‘soft Brexit’ views have earned him abuse from media enemies who have called him ‘slippery and snakelike’.
‘I’m not thin-skinned, but it does annoy me because it’s a misrepresentation. I have no personal career ambitions. My only aim is to get us through this challenging period and come out stronger as a nation.’
Does it upset his wife Susan? ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t be upset? Nobody likes that.’
Asked to describe himself in a word, Hammond pauses before replying: ‘Fiscal.’
It means someone who is sound with money and comes from the Latin noun ‘fiscus’, which means ‘Treasury’ or ‘basket’ from the way Roman emperors used to collect money. But whether ‘Fiscal Phil’ remains in charge of the nation’s coffers if and when Emperor Boris succeeds to No 10 is another matter.
Of course the barbs hurt – who wouldn’t be upset?