There are many good lines in the Ken Clark interview: privatising Royal Mail, dismantling BIS, his fitness regime, his admiration for Mandelson and so on. There were also some striking remarks on the timing of a spending review that are worth highlighting.
Clarke basically argues that it would be senseless to conduct a spending review debate in the run up to an election. I’m not sure it is quite Tory policy, but he makes some interesting points.
I really don’t think you can carry out a public spending round as a public debate. Public spending rounds have to be properly organised administrative and political things. We are having discussions. I’ve had discussions with Philip Hammond myself. But you have to have some collective discussion on how far you can go in tightening policy, present circumstances having settled that. There has to be some pretty hard negotiating about what the consequences would be of making savings in different areas and I’ve never known this done by a series of interviews with journalists or putting out election press releases.
The idea that you conduct a public spending round as part of a general election debate fills me with the greatest horror.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
