The PM and chancellor work best in the interests of the country when they are a partnership of equals It is 50 years since we last had a chancellor of the Exchequer who never presented a Budget. He was Iain Macleod, the most skilful Tory orator of his generation. A month after the victorious prime minister, Edward Heath, had made him chancellor in June 1970, Macleod died. He had been the only man in the Cabinet with the political stature to stand up to Heath. Heath replaced Macleod with Anthony Barber, a man of no political importance. As chancellor, Barber was pliant to Heath’s will. At Heath’s command, he executed the great inflationary U-turn of 1972. When Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1980, “You turn (get the dreadful pun?) if you like: the lady’s not for turning”, she was proclaiming she would never make the Heath/Barber mistake. Sajid Javid is no Iain Macleod, being competent rather than glittering. The Johnson Government is not rocked by his early departure. His replacement, Rishi Sunak, is no Tony Barber, being exceptionally articulate and well qualified. Through no fault of his own, however, having been in Parliament for only five years and still in his 30s, Mr Sunak has no independent power base. He has had to accept the terms which Mr Javid rightly refused: he can have only those advisers whom No 10 supplies. Since special advisers (Spads) are the only people in their departments whom ministers can appoint, if Mr Sunak cannot choose even them he cannot guarantee a single person at his side who puts his interests first. As it happens, Dominic Cummings has handed him a couple of excellent Spads; but the fact remains that if your boss, not you, has appointed the people closest to you, they are not really your servants. Mr Sunak will be an exceptional man indeed if he can turn his relationship with the Prime Minister into a partnership of anything like equals. Yet that is what it is when it works best. The answer to the natural conflict between the Treasury, which tries to save money, and No 10, which seeks to spend it, is not to abolish any clash, but to make the disagreements as grown-up as possible. People are trotting out the fatal clashes of past prime ministers and chancellors – Thatcher and Lawson, Blair and Brown. They forget that for several years (a long time in politics) those relationships were powerful and creative. So were Thatcher and Howe, Major and Clarke, and Cameron and Osborne. In all cases, both recognised that each needed the other. The Thatcher and Blair administrations would never have achieved their remarkable changes without their central No 10/No 11 relationships. By the same token, 
when those relationships started to go wrong, so did everything else. In almost any organisation, the person with the money must be somewhat set apart from the leader. He has to subject the leader’s aims to the sharp test of reality. This is particularly so with prime ministers – such as Boris and Blair – who are not much interested in economics and just want to get at the honeypot. As such, the money man is also a politically useful foil. “I’d love to do X,” says the leader, “but I’m afraid that skinflint next door won’t let me.” Sometimes – often – a prime minister finds it tiresome to be bound by fiscal rules. But it is worse than tiresome if no such rules exist, or if there is no one around who dares enforce them. That is how almost all Labour governments – and many Tory ones – end. In the cautionary case of Heath, the prime minister took over the economic government of the country. The chancellor was invisible. Heath’s implementer, the Cabinet secretary, Sir William Armstrong, had a nervous breakdown under the strain. Heath lost the February 1974 general election. Obviously, Boris’s new Government is not remotely near such a pass. It has a big new mandate, a great task and oodles of energy and optimism. If the Prime Minister is not happy with Mr Javid, it is better, perhaps, to remove him now, rather than to wait for the relationship to sour. It should not escape notice, however, that this Government does not yet have an economic policy. By all means celebrate that the appalling negativity of Philip Hammond’s anti-Brexit sojourn at No 11 is over, but do not assume that it knows what to do next. Boris wants to “level up” wealth and opportunity. He is singing a political version of that hymn, Hills of the north, rejoice. To succeed, he needs the honest truth about how much money we have got, how much we are likely to get, and how much more we think we are going to need. This is the year, for example, when all the demographic pressures of an elderly population increase even more sharply than before. What does that mean for the NHS and social care? Only a Treasury capable of telling the truth is likely to know. It is a question not only of figures, but also of policies. A more economically liberal form of levelling up would create free ports, take advantage of a full Brexit to reduce regulation, and remove outdated business rates from high streets. A more interventionist, statist approach would set up lots of regional development quangoes and create a national industrial policy. A strong Treasury could help work out what’s best. A weak Treasury couldn’t. I once had a friend who had just escaped poverty and persecution in his native country in Africa. When he reached England, I took him to a restaurant and asked him what he wanted to eat. He said “Food!” “Yes,” I said, “but what? Meat? Fish? Vegetables? Eggs?” “Yes!” he exclaimed. I feel that Boris, just now, is a bit like my friend – so delighted to have found his way to freedom, and so plain hungry, that he wants every single thing on offer. He needs a few good people, in key departments as well as in No 10, to help him make some necessary choices. Otherwise, it is shockingly easy to overspend, overborrow, undersave and underinvest. In fact, that is what British governments are best at. If markets come to believe that the Prime Minister has got free run of the restaurant, they will take fright. Then our Government’s capacity to borrow cheaply could quite suddenly vanish. By all means, widen the sources of economic policy. Strengthen No 10, the Cabinet Office, the newish Department for International Trade. But don’t subject all these sources, including the Treasury, to a single control. Such a control will be exercised by the Spads, on whose throne sits Dominic Cummings, with his woolly hat for a crown. In my view, the man is a genius. No one understands better how to campaign and win by sticking to the British principle of war: “Select and maintain the aim.” The problem, though, is that government is only partly about campaigning. Its long-term discipline cannot be upheld by fear alone. There has been too much angst against advisers in modern times – Nigel Lawson’s aversion to Alan Walters, almost everyone’s aversion to Alastair Campbell, today’s obsession with Mr Cummings. Such people sometimes overplay their hands. But how much would ever have happened without their abrasive energy and fierce devotion to their principal? Still, advisers should advise, not spy. When Mr Cummings put out his famous job advertisement the other day, he called for “weirdos” and “misfits”, not for narks. The Javid affair should warn against going too far.