Photograph: Reuters
Robert Chote, chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, used to be director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Paul Johnson, who used to look after public services at the Treasury (among many other things) was a colleague of Sharon White, who is married to Robert Chote. Five years hence, for all I know, White may be director of the IFS, Johnson could be chairing the OBR, and Chote could be boss of Ofcom (White’s current berth). Or any of them could be economics editor of the FT, where Chote made his name.
This, in short, is a close-knit world of similar and similarly able economists, not some canyon of conflict between OBR and IFS. Doors revolve constantly. Forecasts are continually refined (or changed) by the same sort of independent analysts. Which leads to one observation that, gently, the assembled commentocracy of press and broadcasting failed to make last week amid the pother about U-turns, discontinued austerity and abracadabra.
You can miss the story – for example, the £27bn pot of beneficence produced by the chancellor at autumn statement time. You can fill days on punditry based on assumptions – statistics reached months ago by the exact same methods – which are no longer valid. You may not have noticed that, over the past six weeks, the projections surreptitiously switched course. You probably went to endless Treasury briefings, carrying away the usual nuggets for publication, but failed to ask the hardest questions – or register the smirks. You let George make a fool of you.
Chairman Mao says: “It is not hard for one to do a bit of good. What is hard is to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad.” Least of all to admit it.
