Knocked off the cycle
BY THEN, too, the next crisis will have come to knock Chancellor and Treasury, homeworkers and all, off their perches. That is not so much a forecast as a matter of actuarial observation. I have seen it hap- pen to so many chancellors. One moment they are bowling happily along like P.G. Wodehouse's Constable Oates, a police- man with nothing on his mind but his hel- met. The next moment a terrier nips them, and they are off their wheels and in the ditch, upside-down and looking for some- one to blame. That is no time to grumble that they are misjudged by the financial markets or misunderstood in the financial press. Before it happens to this Chancellor he needs to get his machine into gear. Humiliating as the thought must be, he could have something to learn from the men in grey suits and from Margaret Beckett.
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