A former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit is to take charge of co-ordinating the work of the new 1922 Committee Policy Committees.
Namely…John Redwood. Cue a sharp intake of breath at the Treasury, and perhaps in Number Ten too.
The senior Brexiteer is no less a one man think tank than ever, as his daily blog never ceases to remind its readers. Plus his fortnightly Monday column for ConservativeHome.
Yesterday’s gave a flavour of his thinking on national security and economic expansion, just as his long campaign for more North Sea oil and gas is bearing fruit, if what we read of developing Government policy is correct.
Redwood won’t for a moment be telling the new policy committees what to think, but he has the brains and energy to move any slackers among them along.
As I say, the Treasury will be watching this appointment apprehensively. “The UK economy is currently being run on the Maastricht rules as if we had not left the EU.” Redwood wrote on this site recently.
Guido recently published the full list of the new committees. There hasn’t been one shadowing each Government department since the distant days of the 1990s.
The project is part of Downing Street’s new rapprochment with the Parliamentary Party.
So we will see in due course what Andrew Griffith, the recently appointed Head of the Policy Unit, makes of the committees, and vice-versa. Here’s a link to his recent ConHome piece.