Rachel bursts through on the rails to win the City and Suburban Handicap
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Rachel Lomax was my tip for the first Governess of the Bank of England. Now, though, she has been scratched from next year's running of the Great Threadneedle Stakes, and instead has come bursting through on the rails in Whitehall's version of the City and Suburban Handicap. The courses that connect the City with the suburbs have turned out to be the handicap, as Sir Richard Mottram discovered. At the head of the Department of Transport and Odds and Ends, he spoke prophetic words, which I give in Tam Dalyell's Parliamentary version: 'I'm stymied. The whole department's stymied.' Now his successor swoops across from Work and Pensions, along with her douce Momingside minister, Alistair Darling, to undo the stymie. Her skills have been learned in hard schools with difficult masters — at the Treasury, she was Nigel Lawson's private secretary, and at the World Bank, Jim Wolfensohn's chief of staff. In Whitehall, Transport is a department that has always ranked below the salt, but, unlike many senior ministries with grander titles, it can make a difference to the nation's prosperity and its citizens' lives, and no doubt her appointment — together with the dropping of the odds and ends from its remit — belatedly says so. A few months ago I was reflecting on her new department: 'The outtrays are used to house special advisers and spokesmen, with one kept in reserve for the Secretary of State.' Plus another tray for Sir Richard, the not-so-Permanent Secretary. He, too, had stymied up.
The Bandar-Log
THE trouble, I thought, lay with ministers who had found it hard to adapt to the arts of government: 'They brought their courtiers in with them, establishing them as tsars without empires, envoys without embassies, or spinners capable of improvising yarns. This was not and is not the same thing as working with the machinery of government to get results.' It was more like the rule of the Bandar-Log, the tribe of monkeys who went swinging through Kipling's ruined city:
Dreaming of dreams that we mean to do, All complete in a minute or two...
Plenty of them are still chattering in receptive ears, but getting results has not been their strong point and, more than five years into the New Labour era, that is beginning to show. Perhaps someone has noticed. A Treasury contemporary of Rachel L,omax's had made the point to me: 'You can't do it without the machine.' Step one: engage chauffeur, or chauffeuse.
Brown and gold
TIMING can be the hardest part of investment, and only a charlatan would claim to get it right all the time, but even so, Gordon Brown as a gold trader has something to learn. He waited until the price had reached its lowest point for two decades, and then settled down to sell half the nation's gold reserves. Ever since he stopped selling, the price has been rising, it is now at its highest for five years, and the buyers at his auctions may have got a bargain that will never be repeated. At the World Gold Council, Haruko Fukuda reckons that the Chancellor's wrong call has so far cost the country £320 million. Gold is priced in dollars, and the dollar, which has walked on water for so long, has now begun to get its feet wet. It is only a promise to pay, but whose promise would you rather have? There are parts of the world where this question has an immediate and practical importance. India and Pakistan add up to one of them. If you had to leave home in a hurry, owing to late arrival of incoming missile, whose signatures on which pieces of paper would you want to carry with you? Might you prefer a portable and universal store of value whose worth does not depend on anybody's promise? Most people in your part of the world would. How lucky that Gordon Brown has sold it to you, for paper, at an unbeatable discount.
Keeping Meghan out
MEGHAN from Virginia was the most sensible inhabitant of Conservative Central Office, so of course she had to go. She had added an
Oxford MBA to her sheaf of qualifications but our defensive bureaucracy of visas and work permits was too much for her. I now realise that she need have gone no further than Sangatte and then have hopped a train back again. Indeed, in their unofficial way, the Treasury economists would have been pleased to see her, because she could have borne out their forecasts. They are looking for a surge of growth next year, with the economy expanding by more than 3 per cent and making all their other figures right. (I dare say they are pushing the Chancellor's luck, but that is another story.) Immigration, they expect, will do the trick. Their sparkling tome entitled Trend Growth: Recent Developments and Prospects makes their case. The working population is growing because immigration is speeding up and leaving the Government Actuary's previous estimates trailing behind. About 90 per cent of net immigration, so the economists tell us, is accounted for by people of working age, and they are now expected to swell the workforce at a steady rate of 146,000 a year from next year onwards.
A premium on crime
EVERY so often, in these forecasts, the word 'legal' crops up. What the Treasury expects from the black market in labour is not spelt out. At one level it sharpens up competition. Cleaners who do not work five months a year for the Chancellor can obviously undercut those who do, and thus help to keep inflation down. At another, as Harriet Sergeant put it in Welcome to the Asylum (Centre for Policy Studies, f10), it creates a vast criminal industry of people traffickers who prey on immigrants and spread corruption. It also displaces the capable, qualified people with much to contribute who want to come and work here, not necessarily for ever. Perversely enough, our officialdom and its rules keep them out. Meghan was one of them.
Out to lunch
THE Queen came in state to the City this week and was welcomed by the Lord Mayor — and also by the Prime Minister, who might, so some of his fellow-guests thought, have found a word of appreciation to say for his hosts. Still, how grateful we all of us were to be lunching in Guildhall and not in the Dome.
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