Democracy is highly inconvenient. That was the implicit message given by Lord Macpherson, former permanent secretary of the Treasury, who was dispensing wisdom at an event on the spring statement hosted this week by Policy Exchange (where I am a fellow).

One of the minor irritations of life as a Treasury official, he recounted, was having to come up with material for this rigmarole called a Budget that politicians obsess over. During one chat with his ex-boss George Osborne, he recalled the then-chancellor saying: “I can deliver the strategy the Treasury wants provided you provide me with all these announcements I’ve got to populate the Budget with.”

Ultimately, this arrangement had little downside for the mandarins. They duly supplied their chancellor with the pasty tax and the granny tax, the fiscal equivalent a whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair.

Brexit was a source of rather more trouble, but happily Lord Macpherson claimed that he has now “moved on” from his Project Fear days. His secret to peace of mind, he revealed, is his belief that in 20 years’ time, the Conservative Party will have moved on from “this thing” and “we’ll be much closer to Europe”. This is, of course, precisely the fear that motivated Brexiteer decisions for the entire period after 2016.

Reflecting on his long stint at the top of the Treasury, spanning the years from Blair to Cameron, after which he was succeeded by his deputy, Macpherson remarked: “Brown, Johnson and Sunak have rather a lot in common actually.” I wonder why that could be.

Operational Failure 

At the same event, there was one broad point of consensus: where is the extra money needed for defence? Admiral Lord West called Rishi Sunak’s decision not to raise defence spending “extraordinary” and fretted over the weak signal it sends to our allies and enemies alike, at a time when even Germany has promised to get its act together.

On this, Lord Macpherson agreed. “My guess is that we’ve got very few tanks that work,” he said, and getting submarines actually out to sea “was a massive challenge”. Another of the coalition government’s achievements, we should recall, was to delay renewal of the Trident nuclear programme, which is not now expected to be operational until the early 2030s.

This is all the more serious given doubts over whether the deterrent is actually operational at the moment. Two of its four submarines are believed to be being repaired, when three are thought necessary to run the system.

It’s just as well Europe isn’t currently being menaced by an aggressive, nuclear-armed imperialist.

Waking up

On the topic of Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD swept to an unusual absolute majority in regional elections in Saarland this week. The party overturned more than two decades of rule by Angela Merkel’s CDU party, at a time when the country is about to implement gas rationing.

Saarland is a small region, but it could be a harbinger of things to come as voters deliver a reckoning for Ms Merkel’s failed decade. The SPD can hardly escape blame for the situation, but at least it is trying to fix it.

The only party really able to crow are the Greens, who weren’t in power during the crucial period – though they have yet to see this feed through into an electoral bounce. German foreign minister and Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock told a conference this week: “We did not tackle this and this is now taking its revenge in the most brutal way.” By “we”, she meant “they”.

The bottom line is that it is a Leftist-Green government that is finally waking up to the importance of defence and security.

One might conclude, as Lord Macpherson intimated, that it is necessity, and not the fancies of politicians, which really makes government policy.