Boris Johnson feared the Covid response left Britain infantilised and in a “permanent state of doublethink”, his former communications director has said.
Guto Harri claimed Mr Johnson had become uncomfortable with the size of the state in the wake of more than £300bn of spending in response to the pandemic.
Speaking on his LBC podcast Unprecedented, Mr Harri recalled warnings during top-level meetings about the effects of more than a year of draconian restrictions on everyday life, including three lockdowns.
“He basically feared that the UK had become infantilised, essentially addicted to Government telling them what to do, how to live their lives, who they could see, where they could go, et cetera — and also crucially, picking up their bills,” he said.
“He told Cabinet the state had grown too big, too fat and too expensive, that it had spent too much, and for a party supposedly of small government, that clearly wasn’t acceptable.
“So his words, pretty frankly put to the Cabinet, were: ‘We now live in a permanent state of doublethink. What we want to do is provide a more efficient service to taxpayers.’”
Mr Harri said Mr Johnson used other meetings to warn officials against talking about recessions to avoid a “self-fulfilling” prophecy as the economy struggled in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“Another issue for him was the lack of oomph as he saw it in the Treasury. ‘If Rishi’s a Thatcherite, let’s have it,’ he moaned on one occasion without any expectations.”
Mr Harri revealed the former prime minister — who is also said to have described the Treasury as a “bank manager” and likened it to the “computer says no” sketch from the comedy Little Britain — clashed with Rishi Sunak, his then chancellor, over the scale of their party’s spending commitments.
“Rishi in his words had signed too many cheques, but got very little value for money. It was time for tax cuts, deregulation and dynamism,” he said.
In response, Mr Sunak “reminded the prime minister that it had been his vision to spend vast amounts of taxpayer funds on endless infrastructure projects, on new hospitals, on extra cops, extra doctors, extra nurses, extra all kinds of things”.
“And he used a very memorable phrase: ‘We had a song for a long time. Do we not want to sing it anymore?’”