Diary – 21 June 2018

At Chequers last week to interview the Prime Minister, I hear some sad news of Churchill’s mouse. The story goes that the rather fine painting there by Rubens and Frans Snyders, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse, was ‘touched up’ by Winston himself. During the war, staring at the painting, Churchill decided that the mouse was hard to see properly. Never a man for whom self-doubt was a crippling disability, he promptly picked up his paints and improved the rodent. That, at least, was the story put about by Harold Wilson. As I was waiting for Mrs May and her NHS figures, I was told the painting had long since gone away for restoration and had come back ‘with that awful rat cleaned off’. Very sad — though Chequers also has a good original Churchill, a Constable and much else.

May’s NHS announcement was described by the Mail on Sunday as a ‘gamble’. This is probably right, though not because of the row over a non-existent Brexit dividend to pay for it. The problem will be the sound of water gushing once more from the Treasury, into a major department. This leaves Philip Hammond and the Prime Minister with a dilemma. If for the NHS, why not for social care? Then there is the crisis in defence spending, with Trump urging us to increase our contribution to Nato, and Putin giving us good reasons to do exactly that. English schools are also desperate for extra cash; as are local authorities. Having conceded to Jeremy Hunt, a possible successor as Tory leader, Mrs May will have a harder time with other jostling members of her cabinet. Hammond is pushing back hard but the sound of water in a desert is intoxicating.

After any major interview, I turn with great interest to discover from Twitter whether I am currently a sinister Marxist undermining the Tories; a foam-flecked believer in the hardest of hard Brexits; or a mildly outdated Blairite propagandist.