Sir John Redwood, who served as head of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit and is expected to return to government if the Trust wins, said the practice of targeting a fixed percentage of GDP for national debt should be abandoned and the deficit. He also called for a review of both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and suggested the Secretary of State should take inspiration from Mrs Thatcher in removing public services and transport from government control. Since 1997, chancellors have announced fiscal rules during budget statements in an attempt to control government spending. They usually set a limit on the ratio of the national debt or deficit as a percentage of economic output. But in an interview with The Telegraph, Sir John said the practice is a hangover from the EU fiscal arrangement agreed between member states at the Maastricht conference in 1992 and does not encourage economic growth or curb inflation. “I think that having a fiscal rule, which is a variation of the government debt as a percentage of GDP, and the government deficit as a percentage of GDP in any given year, is not really the right pair of rules for the two goals that you have. trying to meet,” he said. The Conservative backbencher said ministers should keep “reasonable controls on the growth of public spending and public debt” by instead monitoring the amount of money the Treasury pays lenders for interest payments. In a coded rebuke to Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor until last month, he added: “You have to elect governments that take control of public finances seriously and then they have to take it seriously. “If you have a government that doesn’t take control of public finances seriously, it won’t matter what your fiscal rules say, as we know from recent past experience,” he said.
“I would be happy to get a job”
Sir John is expected to be appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Mrs Truss’s government and is understood to have helped shape her thinking on economic issues during the campaign. He has spent most of his parliamentary career on the back burner, where he argued for a smaller state and against Britain joining the EU, after dramatically resigning from Sir John Major’s cabinet after the then prime minister told his critics to “worry or shut up.” Sir John said he had had “no discussions” with Ms Truss about taking a role if she won the competition, but told the Telegraph he would take a job if offered. “I’ve always said I’d be happy to take on a job that I thought I could do and that the leader thought was valuable to the conduct of government,” he said.
