Theresa May’s vanity projects

Now that Brexit is no longer her problem, Prime Minister Theresa May has been making a flurry of spending pledges to shore up her legacy – which the chancellor, Philip Hammond, has been furiously resisting.

Emily Hohler
By
published
in Features

Theresa May © Chris J Ratcliffe - WPA Pool/Getty Images

May: her good deeds will not go unpunished
(Image credit: Theresa May © Chris J Ratcliffe - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Now that Brexit is no longer her problem, Prime Minister Theresa May has been making a flurry of spending pledges to shore up her legacy which the chancellor, Philip Hammond, has been furiously resisting. He is right to do so, says The Times. May has "no business binding her chancellor, let alone the next one and her successor to far-reaching and substantial spending pledges", which include an extra £27bn over three years on schools and colleges, independent audits to ensure the effectiveness of a previously agreed additional £2.3bn for mental health provision and a promise to reduce Britain's net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, which Hammond says will cost around £70bn a year.

Hammond said in his October budget statement that the purse strings could finally be loosened after ten years of austerity, having built up some £26bn of "headroom", but his spending plans are predicated on a negotiated Brexit deal.

That money could also be used to "boost the economy in the event of a no-deal Brexit", says The Economist. May's pledges fly in the face of such prudence. Well, they're not going to happen, says Asa Bennett in The Daily Telegraph. She has already backed down on her demand for a cash boost for the education budget, which looks likely to be reduced to a one-off set of cash increases amounting to around £9bn. Meanwhile, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, has ditched her proposal for a £30,000 minimum salary threshold for migrants.

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No matter how many billions May spends, she is destined to be remembered as the one who "tried and failed to pass her Brexit deal", says The Economist. Her attempt to secure her legacy may even be "worse than pointless". At least she had a reputation as a "dutiful public servant". She now looks "more like an entitled popinjay who is willing to sully her government's hard-won reputation for fiscal prudence in a blaze of vanity".

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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