Former Treasury minister savages Tom Scholar

There was much anger and sadness in Whitehall last week at the sacking of the Treasury's top civil servant Sir Tom Scholar by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on his first day in office. But one person who won't be shedding tears for the departing Permanent Secretary is Lord Agnew, who served as a minister in Scholar's department between 2020 to 2022.

Agnew's resignation from government in January was one of the more sensational and principled that Westminster has seen in recent years. Arriving at the despatch box to answer an Urgent Question on fraud in the UK's coronavirus business loan scheme, Agnew said he was unable to defend his department's record and bemoaned how 'arrogance, indolence and ignorance freezes the government machine.' He then quit his Treasury job on the spot, to applause from across the House.

And now the noble peer has returned with a vengeance to haunt Sir Tom once more. In a blistering article for the Times today, Lord Agnew savages the Treasury mandarin's record, declaring that his departure 'should be a cause for celebration.' Consternation from Sir Tom's predecessors Lord O'Donnell and Lord Macpherson should be disregarded on the grounds that they merely constitute 'a metropolitan elite with their own self-reinforcing prejudices.'

Agnew offers up the examples of the Treasury blocking reform of the mismanaged 'golden visas' system and the failure to support the Department for Work and Pensions as proof of a system which 'obsesses about measuring inputs' but which has 'little clue of how to measure outcomes.' He urges Truss and Kwarteng to remove delivery of economic growth from the department's responsibilities and concludes:

“Having worked in his department for nearly two years I saw at first hand the malign influence of the Treasury orthodoxy at play. Whether it was foot-dragging and passive resistance to creating a Treasury office in the north.. or the botched arrangements in the construction of the bounce back loans during the pandemic, all roads led back to him.

With fighting talk like that, might Agnew get his old job back under the new regime?