“I wouldn’t say that we were at war with the Treasury,” Professor David Miles, of the Office for Budget Responsibility, was giving a demonstration of the British art of slipping a knife between the shoulder blades so silently that it takes the victim a while to notice. The Treasury has, in recent days, certainly given the impression of being at war with the OBR, a battle that culminated in the Monday evening resignation of the watchdog’s chair.
Giving evidence to Parliament’s Treasury committee on Tuesday morning, Miles went as far as a senior British official ever does at saying out loud that they’re furious. Did the OBR suspect the Treasury of leaking its interim forecasts? “We were aware that information was getting into the press.” Was that a problem? “It wasn’t terribly helpful.” As bad as that. Wow. Was anything said? “There was no formal complaint.” That left quite a lot of space for some very memorable informal words.
As for the government’s £4 billion surplus, Miles was dismissive. “It was wafer-thin,” he said. “A sliver.”
This was all tremendous ammunition for the opposition: a Treasury in chaos as the Budget approached, selectively leaking about OBR’s work to justify its reverses, and a fiscal situation that was a cigarette paper away from disaster. Except that, for reasons that it cannot be emphasised strongly enough make absolutely no sense, the Tories are arguing that the government is actually flush with cash and raising taxes for the LOLs.
So much about this was bizarre. The Conservatives have spent the past year telling us that the government is out of its depth and making things worse, and that the Chancellor in particular is barely competent. This doesn’t reflect any strategic brilliance, it’s what oppositions always say. But if an Opposition is lucky, events will turn out to support that narrative, and last week they did!
The Tories are arguing that the government is actually flush with cash
It takes a very special kind of politician to pick this moment of triumph to announce that actually your opponent is a genius who is skilfully manipulating the markets for nefarious ends. Nevertheless, this is what Kemi Badenoch did, and the Tories on the committee were tasked with getting the evidence to prove it.
Harriet Baldwin had a crack. “There was a false market in gilt prices!” she declared. Miles didn’t agree. “The Chancellor was saying that this was a very difficult Budget,” he said, “I don’t think it was misleading.”
Someone else asked if it could all have been an attempt to fix prices. “They’d have to be very clever,” Miles said. We were left in no doubt about his view of whether that describes this particular Treasury operation. Watching, all we could do is marvel that the Tories had got themselves into a space where an economist announcing that the public finances were teetering on the brink of disaster was somehow good news for Labour.
Over in the Commons chamber, Justice Secretary David Lammy was announcing restrictions to the right to jury trials. His argument was that the courts are horribly overloaded, that something must be done, and that this was something. He was opposed by two groups: Labour MPs, who don’t trust judges because they fear they’re racist, and Conservatives, who don’t trust them because they worry they’re not racist enough.
Taking the role of unlikely champion of civil liberties was Robert Jenrick. He was armed with a vast number of quotes from Lammy and indeed Keir Starmer abut the importance of juries. “Does the government have no shame?” he asked, which was intended as an attack but sounded, coming from the most shameless man in parliament, like high praise. Jenrick is an unlikely champion of civil liberties or human rights, and his appeal to Magna Carta had a distinct air of Tony Hancock.
For the Shadow Justice Secretary, every day is a leadership bid, and his reply to Lammy was no exception, magnificently histrionic. As he went on, he leaned on the despatch box, looking down the chamber until the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, had to intervene to ask him to address the chair. It is a rare moment that anyone needs to tell Jenrick to turn right.
David Davis, a Conservative with a rather longer record of campaigning for civil liberties, offered a more coherent critique. Governments going back more than 20 years had, he said, “all starved the courts”. Instead of getting rid of juries, Lammy should “put that right”. Fat chance. The OBR may not be at war with the Treasury, but the rest of government certainly is.
