On the table outside Phillip Hammond’s office is a red box with the words ‘Secretary of State for Transport’ embossed in gold. Realising it has caught my eye, Hammond opens it up — it’s empty, as befits a diligent minister. I ask if he follows the ‘Yes Minister rule’ — starting at the bottom to see what his department doesn’t want him to read. I expect him to smile but he looks puzzled, then explains methodically that he takes all the papers out and sorts them in order of importance.
This rather sums him up: Mr Efficiency. He even walks in an efficient way, his long legs taking sensible strides and his arms swinging just enough.
Until the Conservatives fell short of an overall majority, he was also the party’s Mr Efficiencies. As shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Hammond was charged with working out how the Tories would bring the deficit under control. The ease with which Hammond took charge of this most demanding of briefs showed why he had made so much money in business before entering politics. Media reports have him as the richest member of the Cabinet, with an estimated fortune of £7.1 million.
If it weren’t for the coalition, Hammond would be Chief Secretary. But the coalition requires a Liberal Democrat to do that job so he instead finds himself as Transport Secretary. Hammond has taken this like a good soldier. But when I ask him if he considered defecting to the Liberal Democrats on hearing that David Laws was going to resign as Chief Secretary, he shoots back, ‘If I had been a Liberal Democrat I would have been there before him.’ Before going on to say, ‘I am a very open-minded person but one of the things I have never considered is defecting to the Liberal Democrats.’
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