Ex-minister says Kwarteng was right to sack Treasury’s top civil servant
Kwasi Kwarteng was right to sack the Treasury’s top civil servant and his exit was a “cause for celebration”, according to a former Treasury minister.
Former fraud minister Lord Theodore Agnew said the sacked Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar was the embodiment of “the malign influence of the Treasury orthodoxy”.
Kwarteng has immediately tried to shake up the department, after Liz Truss repeatedly said during the Tory leadership campaign that she would change “two decades of Treasury orthodoxy” and its “abacus economics”.
The chancellor told Treasury civil servants in a meeting yesterday that the department must “focus entirely on growth” instead of fiscal discipline.
Agnew, who quit as a minister this year over the government’s Covid fraud record, wrote in the Times that “the removal of Sir Tom Scholar as the lead permanent secretary at the Treasury should be a cause for celebration”.
“Whether it was foot-dragging and passive resistance to creating a Treasury office in the north (in Darlington), which he fiercely resisted, or the botched arrangements in the construction of the bounce back loans during the pandemic, all roads led back to him,” he said.
A Number 10 spokesperson said they would not comment on the story during a national period of mourning for the Queen.
The mood among Treasury mandarins is said to be very gloomy after Scholar’s sacking, which happened on Kwarteng’s first day in the department.
Scholar, who previously worked as chief of staff in Gordon Brown’s Number 10 and as deputy permanent secretary in the Treasury under George Osborne, was a popular figure in the department.
He led the department through Covid and helped deliver the furlough scheme and several other support packages worth hundreds of billions of pounds.
Former Treasury minister John Glen told City PM that Scholar “was, is and always will be an exemplary public servant of the highest calibre in the best traditions of his profession”.
“Tom gave sage and robust advice to generations of politicians of all parties alongside all his dedicated colleagues,” he said.
“I wish him and all Treasury officials well at this time of transition. I know they will continue to give their best as Tom has done throughout his distinguished career in public service.”
Truss and Kwarteng have said they want to bring in radical tax cutting reforms, while also spending more than £100bn in the short-term to protect businesses and households from energy price hikes.
They have said they will increase government borrowing to fund these changes and pay the debt off in the long-term.
Former chancellor and Tory leadership runner up Rishi Sunak has said this approach will be inflationary and is akin to “fairytale economics”.