Dear Sarah, no tanks
I BLOW a kiss to Sarah Hogg in Downing Street — but what I find instructive are the appointments that John Major might have made instead, and didn't. A tremendous swirling and bubbling broke out in the unofficial think tanks, a flap of fins and snap of jaws, as soon as their inmates could see that a new Prime Minister meant a new head of his policy unit — and an instant outcrop of public hints explained why this or that tank's thinker-in-chief would be the obvious choice. Mr Major, thinking for himself, thought differently. He may think, as I do, that the tanks have grown stag- nant. How refreshing they were, a dozen years ago, when they told us that there was an alternative — to the official ideas of the day, which were so obviously getting us nowhere. How shocking it was, and then how exciting, to be told that we could do without exchange controls! They had been with us for forty years, they seemed to be part of the landscape — out with them, said the Institute of Economic Affairs, and out, the next year, they went. It is quite a while since the TEA or the Centre for Policy Studies has conveyed such a sense of excitement. Their trouble, in a way, is that they are no longer against the establish- ment. Standing for the economics of choice, they explain that there is no alternative — and it leaves them wonder- ing what to do for an encore. That will not be Sarah Hogg's trouble. She is an expert scout on the most disputed and most rewarding territory of all, the frontier- lands between the City and Westminister, where stand the structures — of tax, ' savings and ownership — that this Prime Minister will want to reform.
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