A couple of years ago we rented a villa in Ithaca. ‘Who wants to go see Odysseus’s palace?’ I said to everyone sitting by the pool. So I went alone. High on a hill overlooking the sea, among the pines, I found the remnants of a citadel. Last Friday evening I was transported back there by Christopher Nolan’s epic. Settling a few feet in front of the huge West End screen – the last seats available – my neighbour did what no one does in a cinema and introduced himself. He was a Labour minister, one of their brightest young stars, looking a little distracted. Watching a tale of betrayal and meandering missions: he was just preparing for the week ahead.
If Britain had been fighting the Trojan war we’d be on our seventh Agamemnon by now. Each recent one arrives in Downing Street promising a break with the past. ‘Westminster isn’t working,’ these fly-by-night premiers intone. ‘The elites have failed you for 40 years.’ I don’t understand why they all choose to trash the very profession they practise – or the machineries of Whitehall and parliament, which are the only tools available to them. If you tell people that politics itself is broken, no wonder they don’t look to career politicians for the solution. Perhaps acknowledging the successes of politics past would be a better place for these mainstream parties to start: the rescue from industrial bankruptcy under Thatcher and Major; the improvements in healthcare under Blair and Brown; the full employment, regional devolution and rise in education standards under Cameron. After all, it was only ten years ago that we were the darling of the bond market, had an economy outpacing the US, northern cities on the rise and international wealth flocking to our capital rather than fleeing it. We could just start by trying to get back to the home we left.
John is the second Chancellor Healey I’ve met. The first, Denis, was in his nineties when I came up to him and announced myself as the new shadow chancellor. He paused, looked this cocky thirtysomething up and down and said: ‘I think I was shadow chancellor once.’ It was Denis who indirectly gave me the idea for the Office for Budget Responsibility. He’d given a lecture at the LSE about his time in the Treasury in the 1970s, saying that his authority had been shredded because his economic forecasts were so wrong. Alistair Darling faced the same problem. My solution: don’t make them my forecasts, but instead create an independent body to remove the suspicion they’ve been fiddled. Most of the seven chancellors since me have railed against the OBR for spelling out the truth. When the bond markets won’t let you borrow more, and you want to cut taxes, then you need to find the political will to cut government spending. Likewise, if you want to increase spending then you need to raise taxes. If John wants to fund his own defence plan in full, then get ready for either some welfare cuts or some tax rises. It should be the former; my guess is it will be the latter. Then we’ll discover why almost 20 per cent of all Labour chancellors have been called Healey – because, like Labour governments who run against market economics, there haven’t been that many of them.
It’s good to see Kanishka Narayan take a seat at the cabinet table as the minister for AI. In my job, I see how it’s only countries which drive the adoption of this new technology from a strong centre that are succeeding. Kanishka is very impressive, a former civil servant and Stanford graduate who knows Silicon Valley. He also went to Eton, on a scholarship. He’s joined round that table by Hamish Falconer, who went to Nick Clegg’s old school, Westminster. Chuck in an Old Pauline and the omens would be positive.
There’s a famous ill-omen in the Bayeux Tapestry, a comet blazing above Harold’s England. As British Museum chair, I went to see the masterpiece unpacked and laid out. The combination of sweep and detail is breathtaking. I was with the once and future culture secretary Lisa Nandy, and we couldn’t resist a giggle together at the timing as we unveiled this tale of kings in the north and regicide. I think William the Conqueror would have admired Andy Burnham’s ruthless seizure of the crown. Burnham didn’t even have to fight a battle. And perhaps he will prove us wrong and deliver the circuit breaker William undoubtedly did. I hope to see the new Prime Minister with the King and the French President, when we unveil this blockbuster in early September.
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