Raf Baer

If you haven't got the money, who are you going to take the money away from?

All those things.

And that was deficient.

He just didn't have the heuristics, the political ideological compass inside himself to

to say, OK, this is a really hard choice.

I'm going to have to really annoy some people here.

But ultimately, I know where I'm going with this and I'm going to make the case and I'm going to stick with it.

And he looked like he was adrift within months, really.

The original sin was very possibly, and I would say probably, fighting the general election on a manifesto that meant you tied your hands on promising not to raise revenue from income tax, VAT, or national insurance.

Not necessarily doomed, but if you come into office wearing a straitjacket, it's pretty hard to grab the levers of power and steer effectively.

And a lot of people, MPs, ministers, who supported that manifesto and thought it was the right political judgment at the time, will now privately say...

In hindsight, that was a mistake.

We should have had the guts to make an argument for a more radical tax agenda that would have at least given us some kind of capacity to do some of the hard things.

Because once you've made that choice, you're then locked into finding money down the side of the treasury sofa here and there.

And then you get into things like taking money from winter fuel payments.

changes to inheritance tax for farmers, not paying the WASPI compensation, whatever it is, you're desperately trying to get little pots.

And the political costs you pay for that, just basically annoying each little constituency here and there, rather than just doing some big, broad, bold tax change, really meant that the authority of the government was just dissolving day after day after day, and they weren't even making that much money out of it.

So that, I think, is structurally, in hindsight, a terrible mistake that was made.

I mean, there were so many missteps very early on.

Stories about the freebies, getting the concert tickets, the suits, the posh glasses.