The prime minister’s peremptory sacking of the head of the Treasury, Tom Scholar, is ominous. It was one of her first decisions and cannot have been anything he said or did. She had already let it be known, through “allies”, that she also intended to sack the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, but apparently changed her mind. Scholar’s sin was that he supposedly embodied the “Treasury orthodoxy”, which Liz Truss had pledged to overturn. His ousting was clearly meant as a talisman of her new regime.
If there is any defining feature of British government it is the creative tension between transient politicians and permanent civil servants. Good or bad, it has long been a constitutional principle. Continuity and experience are set against risk and innovation, albeit with the politicians ultimately in charge. Scholar has been head of the Treasury since 2016 and led it through perhaps its most tempestuous era, embracing Brexit and the pandemic, both with seismic implications for public finances. There is no evidence that he undermined cabinet policy through these difficult times. He is merely a victim of Truss’s sloganeering.
