By the way: on a lighter note, I cannot surely have been the only listener to one of the radio interviews with the chancellor last week to have been surprised that the distant prospect of a third runway at Heathrow airport seemed to be regarded as a key aspect of economic policy.
This time, the fears are far more serious, as Trump’s barrage of executive orders challenges the constitutional checks and balances designed by the founding fathers to inhibit the autocratic desires of a future wrong’un becoming president.
I may have missed something, but I think Rachel Reeves managed to give an hour-long speech on economic growth last week without referring to Europe.
There was a time when chancellorial speeches were confined largely to fiscal and monetary policy – that is, “tax and spend” and interest rates (which latter are even now not entirely the concern of the Bank of England, because the inflation target is still set by the chancellor).
And on a separate occasion from last week’s “growth” speech, the chancellor even acknowledged the damage that had been wreaked by Brexit.
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