Cameron betrayed public trust – and sounded like Arthur Scargill – when he said ‘money is no object’

There are some things that as a politician you really mustn’t say – things that suggest your priorities are so wrong, and your understanding of public duty so defective, that you can never be entrusted with anything serious. When David Cameron announced yesterday that, in coping with floods, ‘money is no object’, he said one of those things.

For any responsible politician, money – tax payers’ money – is always an ‘object’. As Mrs Thatcher endlessly reminded her colleagues, the government, itself, has no money, only the money it takes from the people. She was right. To declare that there is no limit to what the government is prepared to take from taxpayers for a particular purpose is worse than populism. It is a fundamental and culpable betrayal of public trust. It is, in fact, not dissimilar to the view espoused by Arthur Scargill thirty years ago, when he was asked by the Commons Select Committee during the miners’ strike, how much a pit would have to lose before it became uneconomic and should be shut.