David Gauke on the Conservative Party’s love-hate relationship with the Treasury

The former cabinet minister spoke to students at King’s College London – and to John Rentoul

Gauke was a junior Treasury minister from the start of the coalition government in 2010 (Getty)

I sat in on the last “History of the Treasury” class of the year at King’s College London yesterday. It is a postgraduate class taught by Professor Jon Davis, in partnership with the Treasury. David Gauke was the special guest, providing insights into the troubled relationship between the Conservative Party and the Treasury over the past 12 years.

Describing himself as “more Treasury than the Treasury”, Gauke was a junior Treasury minister from the start of the coalition government in 2010. He was promoted to chief secretary, attending cabinet, by Theresa May in 2016, before being promoted out of the department to work and pensions secretary after the 2017 election.

As part of the shadow Treasury team before the 2010 election, he and George Osborne were “very keen to reassure the markets”. They wanted to be more ambitious than Labour in reducing government borrowing, and proposed setting up an independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to make it harder for governments in the future to massage economic forecasts.