THE Tories have to come up with “something different” as Jeremy Hunt’s Budget hasn’t moved public opinion said former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
He told GB News: “It was a very centrist and very careful Budget. It’s odd that having seen the Budget, the polls don’t seem to have moved at all. I think there’s going to have to be something different in the run up to the election, which is not going to take place in May.
“The idea that if we’re 28, 25 points behind, according to some polls, that we’re going to press the trigger on a General Election, I don’t believe that.”
Asked about another Budget before the election, in a discussion with Camilla Tominey, he said: “I’m not quite sure. It depends, it’s all about the timing. Obviously, if it’s in May, this will be the last fiscal event and the election will have to be called in two weeks. I can’t see that happening.”
He said he thought the Chancellor had made a mistake by abolishing the non-dom tax status: “The problem with that, I mean, it sounds clever and it’s triangulation, the sort of thing we saw 20 years ago, the risk of that is that if you’re essentially taking Labour policies, you’re endorsing Labour, and the electorate will say, ‘well, you’re doing Labour policies anyway, why don’t we just vote for Labour?’
“Michael was here earlier, Michael Portillo, and he used to have a phrase which I remember from back in the day: clear blue water.
“You want some distinction between what you’re offering and what the opposition is offering. If you’re essentially doing a pale imitation of what they want to do, you’re essentially endorsing their platform and people will ask themselves, ‘why don’t we just vote for Labour?’”
Asked if the Budget was lacklustre, he said: “I don’t think he’s going to do bold measures. I’ve been on the inside, a lot of this will be driven by officials, let’s face it, and the officials will be the people who will be there, regardless of what happens in the General Election.”
He added: “That doesn’t mean that people weren’t acting against what the Government was trying to do. I don’t think it was particularly co-ordinated, but there is resistance. There’s often resistance to things that the Government is proposing, but that’s the job of the ministers, to bring people along with them. When I was [Business] Secretary of State, I worked very well with officials, because we had a clear set of purposes.”
On the influence of the Office for Budget Responsibility, he said: “They’re a very powerful organisation and the reason why they’re more powerful now is that we tried to cut them out, Liz Truss and I tried to cut them out.
“The feeling was that we just wanted to get on with things. I think the Prime Minister was very keen to press a programme and she knew that if we went through the OBR, a lot of the things she wanted to achieve would have been prevented, essentially.”
On talk of a Boris Johnson comeback, he said: “Boris is arguably, well not arguably, I think incontestably the best campaigner the party has. He’s won more elections than anyone else in the party, certainly more than the current Prime Minister and he’d be a great force for the party, but that’s a question for the party leaders.
“I certainly think he could lead the party again after the election. I would never rule him out. People have done that all the time and they’ve generally had egg on their face.
“But I think that for this election, it’s very unlikely, firstly, that he’ll be a candidate, and secondly, that I don’t think he’ll necessarily be that enthused about campaigning for people who he feels were the ones who got rid of him.”
