Wouldn’t he have liked the new beefed-up job title?

I have read somewhere that this was mooted by Gordon Brown as part of the Bank of England Act 1998 (which formalised the MPC, etc) but was dissuaded by the enormous complexity of the task. Not sure why it’s more complex than any other rename, but apparently it is.

This immediately got two likes, in case anyone is wondering about the presence of bots on this platform.

My favourite bit of the saga was being copied into the belligerent responses to auto-replies.

Fair - but doesn’t that mean a reduced allowance (say down to £15k or even £12k) won’t raise much revenue?

I can’t help but feel like this sort of thing might lead to some damaging unintended consequences with potentially tragic results. All for a very stupid slogan.

bsky.app/profile/geor...

Agreed. When I was a HMT official in early days of Cameron/Osborne regime. The lack of spads was a real bottleneck, and meant that we asked lots of dumb questions to ministers about what they wanted to do (beyond cutting spending). Much better for them to have someone who can tell us more directly

Someone’s got to point out that no one has ever really cared about how many spads there are.

I mean, I don’t care, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more nerdy about this stuff than me!

The latter group may cry foul with Starmer’s approach, but I’m not sure they’re coming up with realistic alternatives

Yeah, but if you *really* hate the idea of a woman president…

Wealth is wasted on the wealthy

It’s a nice photo. It’s not a pint of beer, but short of that, it’s a nice photo.