It is still a few hours before Philip Hammond makes his speech to the CBI this evening but so much of it has been trailed in advance that delegates might as well just read the newspapers – and then book some entertainment from a juggler or fire-eater instead.
We know he is going to attack what he calls the “populist right”. We know, in a thinly-veiled attack on Boris, he will say:
“There is a real risk of a new prime minister abandoning the search for a deal, and shifting towards seeking a damaging no-deal exit as a matter of policy.”
Then he is going to go on and accuse Conservatives who want to leave the EU without a deal of acting “knowingly to inflict damage on our economy and living standards” and of doing so for “ideological reasons”. The only thing we don’t yet know is precisely what words he will use to thanks his hosts for giving him dinner.
How hard it is, from what we know he is going to say, to remember that Hammond himself once toyed with the idea of a no-deal Brexit – not as a first choice, admittedly, but as a logical course of action in the event of the EU declining to agree to a post-Brexit free trade deal with Britain.
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