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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on who will be Philip Hammond’s successor
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on who will be Philip Hammond’s successor
It is well known that many hardline Leavers want Philip Hammond sacked as Chancellor, I can see certainly envisage a scenario where Mrs May sacks Mr Hammond to save her own skin. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her friends for her life.
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If May sacks a chancellor on the whims of leavers, and picks the replacement on the basis of someone's Brexit credentials, then she'll just show that Brexit continues to devour this government.
We need good government. We're not getting it.
Hammond is not who I would want in No 10 at any point. He lacks the presentational and political finesse for such a high profile role. He is (at best) a technician. But I don't trust his instincts and for that reason, I wouldn't have ever wanted him in a big job.
Fox - too risky for me. His past misjudgements should have prevented him ever returning to office.
Hunt - his open ambition does count against him. Anyone who has been seen to be trying so hard for promotion doesn't deserve it.
Gove - has the brains and strategic thinking to actually make a difference to the running of the Treasury. When you give him the scope to reform, he actually thinks about it and comes up with a strong set of plans. However he is not the most comforting presence.
But I would risk him - because he has the instincts of a reformer and the brains to work out how to deliver.
Gove would be a good choice, certainly comes under the “Making Brexit a positive force for change” camp. The concern would be how to fill his place at DEFRA, which is vitally important for the next couple of years as we take back policy from the CAP.
Fox has been disastrous as DfIT. The department has produced papers on Tariffs for a 21st Century Britain, while he has swanned around Washington. And he's pissed off the Koreans and the Swiss, two countries where we should be replicating existing deals. Replace him with Kwarteng now.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
He would be a disastrous Chancellor, another Brown.
Edit - although another way of looking at that is that (contrary to the lies of Dominic Cummings) at Education he sold out to the civil servants. At Education they are of a very low quality, stupid, lazy, ignorant and arrogant. Their Permanent Secretary at that time, Christopher Wormald, was indeed in my experience barely literate.
At Justice and DEFRA where the quality of his civil servants is rather higher, he has done much better. So it is possible at the Treasury, staffed by the brightest and best, he might do OK. But he certainly would be a courageous choice.
If the Democrats pick someone who's going to spend the 2020 election campaign talking about bathrooms while Trump is talking about jobs, they'll lose to him again. So far they look as if they want to double down on their strategy of getting massive majorities in NY and California where it doesn't matter.
With events yesterday once again confirming the Labour party is unelectable, our country is in a deep, dark hole.
It’s very hard to see a route out.
Sooner the better too - Hammond has the vision and imagination of a used crisp packet.
He is repeating at his current brief - I’d imagine his budgets as CoTE would be very interesting and potentially game changing.
They believe Theresa cannot advocate the Norwegian solution publicly because to do so would provoke hard line Brexiteers to sign a `no confidence` letter in her .
Keeping Hammond is a means of keeping the business world onboard.If he were to be replaced for non-Brexit reasons he would NOT be replaced with a hardline Brexiteer.
I suspect that May resents Hunt refusing to move to business in last cabinet reshuffle so rule him out.Gauke showed a tin ear when Work & Pensions Secretary over the benefits premium rate telephone issue.
Clark, Javid and Rudd are the ones to concentrate on
Mr. Eagles, for the sake of the nation I hope you're wrong.
If she picks Hunt or Rudd she is practically endorsing them to be leader after her.
I managed to lay JRM on betfair on this market (very limited liquidity).
Otherwise I’m not getting involved.
https://twitter.com/peston/status/965131399459205120
If you genuinely believe that having to pull marking criteria for public examinations three months before they are to be sat for the first time because they are so badly written as to be absolutely meaningless is the sign of a successful programme, all I can say is you and I have different notions of success.
You might also allow for the possibility that the reason I criticise Gove is because being exceptionally highly trained in History and Education and having taught everything from infants to postgrads I actually know what I'm talking about.
(I’d bet against him, mind. He’d be just as an appalling choice for next Chancellor as for next Prime Minister.)
Troy was tedious. Game of thrones it is not.
A more considered critique of Troy ... The blokes wore beards and all looked the same so it was difficult to make out who was who. The women kept their clothes on. Helen of Troy? A nice pair but nothing special. And they all seemed to think deep thoughts or spoke in headlines.
Therefore universities pack cheaper courses - history, English, Law etc - with students to subsidise these others. That will be even more vital if fees are cut for those expensive courses, which you may have noticed are rather important ones. Incidentally my last job in lecturing before entering teaching was at a university that had hugely over-recruited on history and needed an extra lecturer for twelve months to plug the gaps that were opening in its teaching provision as a result.
Yet the market is further distorted by the fact Russell Group universities - which ironically often have poor quality teaching - are able to recruit as many students as they wish. Under the circumstances they can and do recruit until they are packed to the gunwales - why would you pay the same to get a degree at Cheltenham as one at Cambridge given the choice? So this model is breaking too. It's not giving the Russell Group time to do research and it's not giving students the best education.
We have two options:
1) abolish the cap on fees and student numbers and allow for a full market across all 113 universities. That would see huge fees at some places e.g. ICL and low fees at others. But the others might offer a way in to postgrad work for students from poorer backgrounds as cost of living is also a consideration (Carlisle is not the world's best university but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to live in than Reading).
2) accept that universities are a public good, will run at a headline loss and therefore need taxpayer subsidy, in which case we need to dramatically restructure and shrink the entire HE sector.
I don't know which, but we need to decide fast.
Incidentally Radio 5 had somebody from the Higher Education Policy Institute on this morning. He talked a lot of sense especially on part time learners. Well worth listening to if you can find it.
If it's any consolation to Mr Flahsman (deceased) Adonis was even worse than Gove. Gove at least had good ideas on paper. Adonis was the sort of person whose ideas would have looked awful on gold sheets.
The difference was that because he was a friend of Tony Blair he could never get anything done.
Mr. Meeks, that is odd. Whether you like Mogg or not, if he's in the running (in markets, at least) for next PM he should be a potential Chancellor, even if it's a long shot.
Mr. Felix, I forget who, (not Adonis) but one frequent Twitterer compared leaving the EU to the Black Death a week or two ago.
One way of fulfilling a manifesto pledge!
I'll get my coat...
The issue is there are 2 questions that get conflated: (a) how do we finance tertiary education and (b) how to we capture the social benefit from higher education. You need to separate these.
The answer is to make universities entirely free standing and independent of government and allow them to charge what they feel appropriate for their courses. This will ensure clear market pricing and reflect the relative value of different courses and institutions.
Then there is a government resource allocation decision to capture social benefit. This is a political decision and rightly one to debate at that level. This could be to subsidise certain courses which are seen as adding greater social value (eg STEM or Medicine); or to support individuals financially for academic or other social reasons (eg poverty or social exclusion); or perhaps to support specific institutions that are seeing as adding extra value (eg Open University). At election times there would then be a debate on the right amount to spend on tertiary education and on how those resources should be allocated.
My own view is that Gove suffers from absolute confidence in his own ideas, and impatient of inconvenient stuff which doesn't fit with them. Where simple reform is necessary, that can ben a strength; for more complicated tasks, his impatience with complexity can be very damaging.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/21/collapsing-wakefield-city-academies-trust-asset-stripped-schools-millions-say-furious-parents
(If we're seriously considering Fox as a possibility, then actual qualification for the post is obviously an irrelevance.)
Public schools have been privatised by stealth and their wealth siphoned off to private companies.
One of my big takeaways from the Fall Out book was that Hammond doesn't seem popular
Gove is therefore his most likely successor at the moment, in the event of a future Boris or JRM leadership
Oh wait...
If some rich thick kid wants to pay £100,000 to study basket weaving at Pontypandy University that’s fine, but they shouldn’t expect support from the taxpayer to do so
Certainly in studying physics there was no magic barrier. If anything the stuff you learn after 18 is more essential.
Perhaps May will promote a woman to chancellor for the first time. Perhaps she will be bold, and not promote a big beast to the job and make one of the newer younger ministers chancellor, possibly as a springboard for the premiership.
It looks like Mary Beard has been on the receiving end of some pretty disgusting tweets after she defended Oxfam.
http://twitter.com/wmarybeard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM4Wcqe6s_s
He needs to get this review done quickly and start making decisions.
Not on my radar for leader
If you position it correctly I suspect - for example - a university would choose a kid with a state academic scholarship over a full fee paying kid because it signals they are smart
Why give one of those places to a Wykehamist (whose parents can afford the cost) and thereby deny a life-altering opportunity to a bright kid from the back streets of Liverpool?
Does Liam Fox have any ability in ANYTHING? Was he any good as a doctor?
I suspect agreement on this subject is unlikely. One reform I would like to see is students treated more like independent adults. The more you bring parental wealth into the equation, the less independent you people are encouraged to be.