Hammond horror

Draining the life out of Brexit?

Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer fighting for Britain or for Brussels? Hard to tell, said the Daily Mail, after the way he “treacherously undermined the PM’S strongest bargaining card” in the Brexit negotiations: her insistence that no deal is better than a bad deal. Writing in The Times last week, Philip Hammond declared he wasn’t going to spend any money, at this point, preparing for a no deal outcome. He might as well have “run up the white flag to Jean-claude Juncker”. Britain, at this critical juncture in its history, needs a chancellor with vision rather than “half-hearted, lugubrious appeasers like Mr Hammond”. Many senior Tories are also calling for his head, said Paul Goodman on Conservativehome.com. “What he is doing is very close to sabotage,” fumed former chancellor Nigel Lawson. And in The Sunday Times, a Remain-supporting cabinet minister urged that Hammond be replaced by Michael Gove. “We need a chancellor who is inventive and proactive,” said the unnamed minister.

These attacks are incoherent, said Oliver Wiseman on Capx, and I speak as one who is “glad Britain is leaving the EU”. Hammond isn’t some devoted Europhile like Nick Clegg: when David Cameron appointed him foreign secretary in 2014, he was seen by many as dangerously Eurosceptic. He just realises the Brexit process is complicated and creates uncertainty for business: he wants to provide a bit of certainty. Hammond is hated “because he puts facts before emotion”, said Matthew d’ancona in The Guardian. But to fault him for being financially cautious is absurd: that’s what chancellors are meant to be. And how do you prepare for a “hard Brexit” in any case? If Britain crashed out of the EU without a deal, customs and international regulation systems would cease to function. “It’s deluded to suggest spending a few billion here or there would prepare for such an outcome.” On the contrary, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, he could start by, say, creating a free port in Belfast and expanding places like Hull or Southampton to take the strain off Dover. In fact, there are endless things he could do to build what is utterly lacking in the Treasury – a sense of optimism.

Hammond has become a target, said Anne Mcelvoy in The Observer, because he’s a “step-by-step technocrat” in a government riven between Brexit true-believers and sore Remainers. He wants a soft Brexit that keeps us as closely tied to the EU as possible, and a gradual four-year transition period to achieve it; and he thinks such a deal is more than likely, so he doesn’t want to waste money or political capital on a no deal scenario. But the fact that he, almost alone, has made up his mind on how to do Brexit infuriates the others. Still, he’s probably safe for now. It’s not just that sacking him in the run-up to a Budget would be “another dent to economic confidence”. It’s because, as one of his prominent Remain colleagues explained to me: “If he goes, the battles will spread and draw in everyone else. He’s doing TM a favour by putting up with it all, not the other way round.”