We know little about the real Rishi Sunak … but that may change this week

theguardian.com:

There’s something odd about Rishi Sunak. The chancellor has rarely been out of the news since he took over at the Treasury from Sajid Javid two years ago and his approval rating with the public is high. His reputation as a safe pair of hands means he could be the next prime minister – yet we know little about what he believes.

To the extent that while a picture of Sunak has emerged through the blizzard of budgets and mini budgets of a technocrat fascinated by Silicon Valley-style capitalism, in truth there have been only hints of an over-arching philosophy.

Sunak has the chance to do something about that when he gives the Mais lecture on Thursday, an event at which previous chancellors have taken the opportunity to lay out a credo.

Nigel Lawson certainly did in 1984 when he rejected the postwar consensus that macro-economic policy (the big picture stuff such as interest rates, public spending and tax) should be about delivering full employment while control of inflation was the job of micro-economic policy (supply-side measures).

In his Mais lecture 15 years later, Gordon Brown cavilled with Lawson’s notion that deregulation was the key to productivity growth but broadly agreed with his predecessor’s view of the role of the two halves of economic policy. Indeed, Brown had handed control of interest rates to the Bank of England in 1997 for this very reason.

But the new orthodoxy only lasted for as long as the economy stayed out of serious trouble. In both the global financial crisis and, to an even greater extent during the Covid pandemic, demand management came back into fashion. Under Sunak, big picture macro-economic policy has all been about jobs and growth. The nitty-gritty, supply side stuff has taken a back seat because