The ideologists of Downing St are now faced with the opposition of events | Business

WWhen Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963 was asked, what worried him most, his famous response was opposition to the events. It has sort of been revised, as these quotes tend to do, at events, dear boy, at events.

The beauty of the original answer was that, with his characteristic sardonic spirit, Macmillan also had a crack at the supposed weakness of the Labor Party of the official opposition at the time. But this opposition contained political giants, such as Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell and his chief adversary, Aneurin Bevan. Both were titular chiefs of the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites. So, as now, the Labor party was at war with itself; but things were nowhere near as hopeless as they are now.

Bevan was often confused in the minds of the public with Ernest Bevin, secretary of foreign affairs in the post-war Attlee government, who died in 1951. Bevin had been one of the founders of the Transport and General Workers Union. Do you think: who would you rate above? Ernest Bevin, who has done so much for the labor movement and the revival of Europe, or the current leader of the successor to the TGWU, Len McCluskey, and Boris Johnsons' secretary of foreign affairs, Dominic Raab?

A recent-day Macmillan would no doubt be tempted to make a similar crack about the state of the current Labor opposition. The Johnson / Dominic Cummings alliance was in the ropes last fall, but then, led by the naive and inexperienced Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, the opposition parties fell into the trap prepared for them and precipitated the election that Johnson and Cummings needed to get clinch.

However, no Macmillans of the last few days are in sight. Regardless of everything else, he was a leader of the Conservative Party. I recently spoke to a former member of the Thatcher government who said: It is no longer the Conservative Party. It's Brexit.

And Johnson and Cummings, the engine of the Brexit government, have been affected by events, the most obvious of which is the coronavirus crisis and the ensuing panic. To deal with it, they need all the help they can get from the public service machine, rather than doing everything they can to upset it the way Cummings has it exhorted.

The economic impact of Storm Corona is increasing day by day, disrupting airline companies in the hospitality sector. In addition, via globalized supply lines, the economic consequences of reacting to the spread of the virus resemble a precursor to the blow to supply lines, production and jobs threatened by Brexit cliffside and without agreement.

I know reasonable people who say that there are a lot of saber strokes and that it will be in the interest of both parties to compromise; but this is not how it seems to me. British negotiator David Frost deepened the claim that sovereignty is more important than economic well-being. Her thinking seems to be that, because we are sovereign, we can choose to give up the benefits of the single market that Margaret Thatcher helped put in place just to prove that we are sovereign! Meanwhile, EU negotiator Michel Barnier rightly continues to try to keep Johnson to the promises he made publicly regarding compliance with current social and environmental regulations after the transitional transition period this year. Alas, the truth, the facts, and the promises do not live up to Johnson's priorities. What counts in the chaos of Downing Street is belief.

Which brings us back to the events of Macmillans and their impact on this week's budget of Rishi Sunak, the last Chancellor of the chessboard, a true Brexit believer. Before the virus appeared, my friend Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, warned that the promised increase in public investment of around 20 billion a year should not have more than a modest impact on productivity and should not offset the negative impact of Brexit.

There has been a lot of pre-budget discussion about how government fiscal rules could hinder the reach of chancellors at a time when productivity growth is negligible and unemployment is relatively low. There has also been a lot of discussion about how the rules are made to be broken. The advent of panic may prompt these renowned economic advisers Johnson and Cummings to urge the Chancellor to exercise caution in the face of the winds.

But the important point is that the event of the virus and its consequences are becoming more important for economic policy, both fiscal and monetary, than whatever the longer term goals of Cummings and co. Pragmatism does not govern ideology.