Jeremy Hunt came to talk to students at King’s College London this week. “I want to set you a challenge,” he told them. “The narrative that is prevailing about the British economy is totally mistaken. It is that politicians failed to make tough decisions; that Britain is trapped in a cycle of low growth; and that we are worse than comparable countries. None of this is true.”
As he set about trying to debunk the “fiction” promoted by Rachel Reeves, his successor as chancellor, he seemed to have two aims. One was to defend his record, making his case in what might be regarded as History’s first court of appeal: the “Chancellors and Treasury” postgraduate course at King’s taught by my colleagues Ed Balls and Chetun Patel.
