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‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And I knew then that the party is doomed. It wasn’t what he said so much as the way that he said it: in the fond, amused, each-to-his-own tone you might use to dismiss a friend’s enthusiasm for Morris dancing or Napoleonic re-enactment or dogging… But personally, I think free market economics (of the Austrian or any other classical liberal school) is far too important to be left to wonks, think-tankers and out-there right-wing commentators. So did Margaret Thatcher. ‘Hayek’s powerful Road to Serfdom left a permanent mark on my own

I think it’s fair to say that Theresa May did not have a cracking conference, but the sympathy vote might even help her. I certainly felt sorry for the Prime Minister, and instinctively don’t like the nasty playground teasing from the Men of Twitter. (She does have diabetes, too, which can’t help.) But she has to go nonetheless, not because she’s unlucky but because she has a tin ear; why else would she choose to raise such issues as racial discrimination in mental health, sores that can’t be healed but which invariably paint the Tories as the ‘Nasty Party’ – a Ratnerism she coined. Ditto with tuition fees. As for

The well-known saying goes, ‘there is nothing to fear but fear itself’. This certainly should be the mantra of Brexit. Disruptive as it might be, Brexit should be the reset button for an enterprise economy, a bright new future of growth and entrepreneurialism, open and free markets – in effect a ‘New Model Economy’ – but few are making the case for this. Certainly, the government isn’t. When I became director general of the British Chambers of Commerce over six years ago, one of my first media interviews led me to say that I thought there was no political party in the UK that truly represented business. By that I

Big business is back with a vengeance at this year’s Labour conference. Twelve months ago, in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as Labour leader, the party’s gathering was largely shunned by corporate firms. The likes of Google – who had exhibited in 2015 – stayed well away. But in the wake of the party’s relative success at the general election – and with no sign of Corbyn going away any time soon – the companies are back. Google are among those exhibiting at the conference. Microsoft are here, too. And so are BP. But it seems like their efforts might have been in vain. While delegates crowded around stalls

Sir David Norgrove, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), is an honourable man. When he publicly rebuked Boris Johnson for his use of the famous £350 million figure about our weekly EU contribution, I am sure he was statistically, not party-politically motivated. But two points occur. The first is that Sir David was, arguably, mistaken. He thinks Boris said that, after Brexit, Britain would have £350 million a week more to spend. He didn’t. He said ‘we will take back control of roughly £350 million a week’. This is correct. So long as we are in the EU, that £350 million a week is out of our control,

Okay, it’s a rainy Sunday, but surely the new chief of the UK Statistics Authority has better things to do than send angry tweets to the Foreign Secretary? Alas not. Today Sir David Norgrove, the newish chairman of the UK Statistics Agency, tweeted out a letter declaring himself ‘surprised and disappointed’ that BoJo has ‘chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union’. He says that this ‘confuses gross and net contributions…. It is a clear misuse of official statistics’. Sir David Norgrove writes to Foreign Secretary about use of

House prices are in freefall. Unemployment is rising relentlessly. The pound is plunging on the markets, and companies are re-locating to Paris and Frankfurt in droves. In the parallel universe Mark Carney increasingly seems to live in, that is a pretty accurate description of the British economy. In this universe, however, the picture is very different. The economy is doing just fine – and that is making it increasingly hard to understand why interest rates are being held at ‘emergency’ levels to cope with the ‘catastrophe’ of leaving the European Union. At a meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee yesterday, the Bank left rates on hold at 0.25 percent, while

It used to be the weather that served as the catch-all excuse for poorly performing businesses – it is too cold or too hot for people to go shopping. How convenient, now we have grown a little tired with that one, that Brexit has come along to serve the same purpose. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, John Lewis chairman Sir Charlie Mayfield was asked to explain a 53 per cent fall in profits for the first half of the year. To be fair to him he didn’t initially mention Brexit at all but when the inevitable question came from Today’s business correspondent he said: ‘We should be under

Louise Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, is, according to the university’s website, a political scientist whose research ‘specialises in international security with a particular emphasis on terrorist movements’. Next time she tries to defend her £350,000 salary I suggest she corners someone from the economics department for advice. I don’t think, at her current state of understanding, she would get very far in a PhD on relative pay in the fields of business, entertainment and academia. I am sure Ms Richardson works very hard and her work is all terribly worthy but, alas, in a capitalist system that is not, and has never been, how financial rewards

For once, theres’s no vacancy in the shadow cabinet but when one inevitably comes up, Mr S would like to put forward his pick for promotion: Jared O’Mara. The Labour MP popped up on Channel 4 News last night to criticise the Tories for their spending on benefits. Inevitably, the dilemma of how it would be paid for came up. While that question might have troubled some, O’Mara had an answer: Britain has ‘loads of money’ to spend, he insisted. The Labour MP’s insight didn’t stop there though, as he also revealed where the much talked-about ‘magic money tree’ is: ‘If you want to know where this magic money tree

Fifty billion? Seventy-five? In its wilder moments, the FT might even splash on a hundred billion pounds as the minimum cost of our exit from the European Union. As the negotiations over our departure reach perhaps the thorniest issue of all, the final bill will have to be settled. But what should it be? If the hardliners on both side would calm down for a moment, then the answer should be very simple. We should agree to cover the cost of the disruption our departure creates, but only in return for a fair deal on trade. It is probably a mystery to most people why we have to pay anything