Rishi Sunak’s definition of a ‘sustainable’ deficit

Last week, Katy Balls and I interviewed Rishi Sunak for the Christmas issue of The Spectator (out today) and his comments on debt have caused some interest in today’s newspapers. As ever with such interviews, there’s only so much you can squeeze into two pages but I thought it worth elaborating on his position today. I suspect it will come to define the political debate next year: yes, 2020 was a year of almighty splurge. Sunak has borrowed more in ten months than Gordon Brown did in ten years: but there was a pandemic. The question is how you get that back to normal.

For a surprising number of Tories, it’s a question of ‘whether’ you get it back to normal. Why not let debt rip? Let it go from today’s 100 per cent of GDP to 120 per cent or even 150 per cent? Surely all that matters is the repayments – and they’re at a postwar low.