GRANT SHAPPS MP: Who to blame for the Budget fiasco? Theresa May's No 10 army 

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Theresa May’s honeymoon has been unusually long and I would argue well deserved, says Grant Shapps MP

A fortnight ago, I nipped down to the chip shop to grab a takeaway with my 12-year-old son. As we placed our order, a constituent approached me to proclaim her enthusiastic support for Theresa May. ‘I’ve never been a Tory,’ she declared. ‘In fact, my entire family are die-hard Labour.’

To prove her point, she listed the names of long-passed Labour councillors, close family friends, who still have buildings named after them in my patch. So what had changed? ‘It’s Theresa May,’ she said. ‘She’s got the right idea. Looking after everyone. She represents us all now.’

I don’t recall her actually using Theresa’s favourite, slightly clunky, phrase – ‘a country that works for everyone’ – but this was clearly her sentiment.

My son raised her comments on our stroll home, asking: ‘Does that mean Labour can never win again?’ I cautioned that politics goes in cycles and that eventually things would change. Given time the Opposition would recover, or we would slip up. Or both.

Theresa May’s honeymoon has been unusually long and I would argue well deserved. She has set a different, refreshing tone. Less spin. No desire to fill every broadcast hour with government propaganda and, given her slightly shy nature, fewer broadcast interviews. All in all, an impression of sound values, competent government and a strong leader at the helm.

But my chat in the chip shop was a fortnight ago. Since then, certain events, some inevitable and some unforeseen, have come to the fore. From the ever-present challenge of negotiating a good Brexit, combined with the untimely call for another ‘once-in-a-generation’ Scottish referendum; the challenges facing May dwarf those of most of her predecessors, back to Churchill.

As her travel diary demonstrated last week, this Prime Minister has her hands very full. But like most of our backbenchers, I believe that if anyone can handle this sort of packed agenda, it is Theresa May.

All of which makes No 10’s haphazard response to Philip Hammond’s troubled Budget all the more worrying. I cannot recall a Chancellor who at some point didn’t deliver a clanger of a Budget. On this occasion the faux pas was to either forget our National Insurance manifesto pledge or to merely misjudge the reaction to breaking promises. Either way, the row kicked off and the hunt for whoever should have spotted it was on.

There were many potential candidates. I read that the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Ben Gummer, was responsible because his role includes ‘co-ordinating the delivery of government policy across departments’. But the notion that this relatively junior Minister could have somehow known about and then stopped the Chancellor’s Budget is fanciful. He is blameless.

A more plausible explanation is that the entire Cabinet, briefed in advance, are culpable. Shouldn’t one of their number have objected? I sat round that Cabinet table on a half a dozen Budget days to receive the Chancellor’s hurried briefing. In 15 minutes, he would canter through every aspect of the Budget. A brief discussion would ensue, but I do not recall an occasion when the Cabinet rounded on a single budgetary measure. Whether the manifesto NI contradiction was raised, I do not know. It would have in any case been too late to amend two hours before the Budget.

 As her travel diary demonstrated last week, this Prime Minister has her hands very full

Of course, No 11 should have prevented this. Perhaps the Spreadsheet Phil parable, combined with a lack of political nous, prevented those closest from asking the right questions. Either way, they missed it.

And there is the army of No 10 advisers. They had both the time and the power to stop this measure in its tracks. The fact they failed to kill it is bad enough, but then to retrospectively engage in briefing against their own Chancellor is unacceptable. The Prime Minister has some talented individuals working for her. Loyal and intelligent, their instinctive protectiveness helped ensure May thrived as the nation’s longest-serving Home Secretary of modern times.

Their vision shaped May’s albeit brief leadership campaign and, since reaching Downing Street, they have set much of her domestic agenda. But of course, no guidance will be right 100 per cent of the time.

Over a three-year period, I helped advise David Cameron at daily meetings in his study at 8.30am and 4pm. With a positive atmosphere among his team, sometimes we agreed, on other occasions we’d constructively argue it out. In hindsight, I can see that we got it right, perhaps, only two-thirds of the time.

However, the one thing which was always off-limits was to brief against colleagues. Indeed, if Cameron detected even a whiff of it, he would firmly stamp it out. Banished were the corrosiveness days of Blair and Brown wrenching Downing Street and the wider government apart.

No government can maintain the public’s confidence if it is outwardly split. And while it is healthy to have those policy debates privately, the game is up the moment these divisions become public and acrimonious.

The PM’s closest advisers must have a zero-tolerance attitude towards corrosive briefing about colleagues – either by themselves or others on their behalf.

Only then will our new supporter in my local chippy maintain her support for the heroic, near impossible, task our Prime Minister has begun.