In the mid-1980s, Labour leader Neil Kinnock was considering splitting the Treasury in two, with one half focussed on its responsibility as a finance department and the other on economic growth. He asked his shadow chancellor, Roy Hattersley, which department he would like to lead in government. Hattersley replied: "Whichever one is called the Treasury."
I was reminded of this (possibly apocryphal) anecdote today, when it emerged that Francis Maude, a former minister and Conservative Party chair, had produced a review which is to recommend, amongst other things, that the Treasury be broken up.
The Times reports that in this brave new world, there would be a 'budget ministry' doing boring things like allocating money to departments and analysing their performance, but that HMT would "lose oversight of individual public spending choices".
Attempts to clip the Treasury's wings are as old as time. It was Harold Wilson who, in 1964, appointed George Brown to head the new Department of Economic Affairs, with the aim of creating an alternative economic power base to the Treasury within Whitehall. It did not work.
Brown departed within a couple of years for the foreign office and, after being passed around for a while, Wilson himself took on the brief. An idea that, as Andrew Marr writes in his brilliant book, A History of Modern Britain, "came to him in the middle of the night after he had been woken by his adored but delinquent labrador, Paddy. That did no good, and the DEA died."
Wilson wasn't alone. There was Kinnock as above, Blair floated the idea in 2005, as did Bob Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, who published a review in 2017 for then shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, which made similar recommendations. Thus far, none have come to anything.
Maude is right, of course. The UK Treasury is uniquely powerful, certainly compared with finance departments around the world. It is responsible for managing public spending, strategic oversight of the tax system, financial services policy, fiscal stability, the delivery of infrastructure projects across the public sector and ensuring the economy is growing sustainably. That is an unwieldy list. There is a reason others do it differently.
The question is, does this matter? It seems esoteric at best. Well, structures and the centralisation of power clearly make a difference. In its current guise, the Treasury frequently stands accused of prioritising budgetary control over growth, while the frequency of fiscal events can favour eye-catching proposals over the focus on long-term goals.
Of course, there is a simple reason why breaking up the Treasury has never – and likely will never – happen. Whoever is appointed chancellor would be mad to do it. Say you're Rachel Reeves, newly installed at Number 11 with a parliamentary majority of 100 and an economy gasping for air. Would you really make it your first task to give away the levers of power to, and I'm picking on him purely because of his job title, Jonathan Reynolds?
But there's a better reason to be wary of change. Splitting the Treasury threatens to become one of those magic boxes that Brexit became for Leavers and Rejoin is now for rejoiners. The reality is the UK is not a machinery of government change away from fixing its deep-seated economic problems.
A divided Treasury will not magically connect the great cities of the north of England by high-speed rail or lead to mass housebuilding in the south. Britain will still be Britain. Incumbent homeowners will cling to their incentives not to permit development. Energy prices will remain higher here than in the US. The deficit will need to be eradicated or financed.
We can either address these problems or not. I'm not convinced a Velvet Divorce, bequeathing a Treasury even less interested in economic growth than before, will help much with that.
In the comment pages, Nimco Ali reveals that people say anti-Semitic things in front of her and expect her to agree. She wants to know: is it because she's a black Muslim? Anne McElvoy reckons the expensive dresses and sharp suits show Labour has changed. While Suzannah Ramsdale shares a horror story that makes bedbugs on the Tube seem like barely a scratch.
And finally, I somehow missed this. What happened when Melanie McDonagh tried Jennifer Aniston’s salmon sperm facial
