Chancellor achieves new heights

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Last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer did his best to sabotage any hope of retaining good access to EU markets by insisting that the UK will deliberately diverge from EU standards and regulations; this week he went to Davos and came close to starting a tariff war with the USA.  It certainly honours the government’s commitment to run talks with the EU and the USA in parallel rather than in series, but I hadn’t realised that the objective of doing that was to wreck both.  But, wait a moment – what was the Chancellor even doing in Davos?  It’s only a month since the PM banned all cabinet ministers from attending the gathering saying that they were going to be far too busy at home.  It was, of course, a ‘Boris Johnson pledge’, and therefore not meant to be taken seriously, but it’s a pretty blatant U-turn even by his standards.  Perhaps the PM thought that, after attempting to sabotage the EU talks last week, the Chancellor could do less damage in Davos than he could if he stayed in London.  If he did, the PM may have, to use a Bushism, seriously misunderestimated Javid’s capacity for following his own example.