The Economy

Of course I will. When I was the Education Secretary we said that there would be over £1 billion of cuts in the schools budget at that time. We said, for example, that we would cut the police budget by 12%, but not by 20% with the loss of 16,000 police officers throughout the country. We would have raised national insurance. We raised the top rate of tax, but we would not have raised VAT to 20%, precisely because it would have choked off the recovery, as it has done this year. I can tell the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues, the friends of the Chancellor, that I was reading a profile of the Chancellor a week ago, a few days before the autumn statement, in which one ally said:"““'The autumn statement will correct the idea that we are off course'””." Whatever were they on? One only needs to read the rest of the article to understand what is really going on. It goes on to say that the Chancellor"““has started taking discreet steps towards the Tory leadership. . . Members of the 2010 intake of MPs . . . are invited to discreet drinks at No. 11. The favourites””—" I do not know whether the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) is one of the favourites; perhaps he could tell us in another intervention—"““The favourites are invited to bibulous soirees at Dorneywood.””" If you ask me, it sounds as if they have been drinking rather too much. Let me give the House another quote from one of those allies, because it was so revealing:"““Nobody in the Osborne circle is vulgar enough to talk openly enough about his leadership ambitions. . . 'George has no agenda. I have never heard any talk of a timetable,'””" said an ally,"'““But the unspoken assumption is that the party would be a lot safer in George's hands than with bonking Boris.'””"