It’s hard not to feel a little bit sorry for Philip Hammond. He has a prime minister who would have sacked him if last year’s general election had worked out as she had planned. Then there are the cabinet colleagues who cannot stand the sight of him, either because they think he’s some kind of soggy Remoaner who is deliberately trying to thwart the “One True Punishment Brexit” or because they suspect he’s starving their departments of cash. Or both.
To make things worse, he’s been lumbered with a Treasury team of Liz Truss, Mel Stride and Robert Jenrick that doesn’t even qualify as B list. Barely even capable of managing an Instagram account, let alone the economy. So Hammond is a man alone. The closest you are a likely to find to intelligent life in the current government. Not that the bar is very high.
There was a brief moment back in March when the chancellor tried to pretend he didn’t care. If the party wanted him to be Tigger, then Tigger he would be. He would reframe austerity as a period of unparalleled growth, low-paid part-time work as full-time employment and Brexit as the springboard for the UK to become the world’s leading player. That window has long since closed. He just couldn’t maintain the act. In his heart, he was a natural Eeyore. Someone who understood there was no bad situation that couldn’t get worse. He was Lurch the Undertaker.
At Treasury questions, Hammond was almost demob happy, secure in his inner miserabilism. As every other minister seemingly now felt free to pursue their own agendas, then he could, too. No need to sugar coat the news. He could just tell it like it was. And it was going to be bad. Very bad.
How much of the extra £20bn per year for the NHS was going to be funded by the prime minister’s “Brexit dividend”, asked Liberal Democrat Tom Brake. A half-smile crossed Hammond’s lips. He shrugged. To be completely honest he really didn’t have a clue. But his best guess was almost none, partly because we would still be paying into the EU budget for the next couple of years but mainly because all the Treasury forecasts pointed to Brexit costing the country £20bn per year. So it was going to cost everyone more in tax.
The shadow chancellor is an unlikely champion of global capitalism but he is also not a man to look a gift horse in the mouth. So when almost every business organisation has taken to issuing panicky warnings about the state of the Brexit negotiations, John McDonnell couldn’t resist reading them out. The charge sheet against the government ran to several pages, but the Undertaker couldn’t have been more grateful. This was music to his ears.
Yes, he was well aware of the cost of a no-deal Brexit and the likely loss of jobs, the Undertaker said. But he couldn’t say anything on the current state of the negotiations because no one really had a clue what was going on. The prime minister herself could not even remember if she had come up with a third customs solution that the EU had rejected and, if she had, she certainly hadn’t told anyone else. It was her little secret. One that she was even keeping from herself.
But he would be happy to keep everyone in the loop after the Chequers sleepover. Providing he got out of the place alive. The way that was shaping up, there were no guarantees of anything. It could be a bloodbath in which everyone died and nothing was decided. Come to think of it, that was the most likely outcome. But if and when he could, he would. Not least to cover his own back. If Brexit all went belly up and the UK crashed out with a bad deal, he wanted to make sure no one would be pointing the finger at him.
It was a surreal moment. One that even silenced the Brexiters in the chamber who wisely chose not to ask a single question. Because they would get answered. Ministers usually regard departmental questions as a potential minefield, one through which they have to tread carefully to say as little as possible. Instead, Hammond had come clean. Loud and proud.
