Two faces and a forked tongue: The key components of a political toolkit

David Cameron tells China to invest in the UK and profit, but tells himself not to invest and so save money

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, holding the famous Budget Box aloft outside Downing Street in 1984 (Getty)

My Politician of the Week is Nigel Lawson. The former chancellor was on the radio upbraiding the Governor of the Bank of England for having dared to suggest that EU membership has made the UK economy more dynamic. The state banker should not be allowed to say such political things, Lawson added, though he was happy to applaud Mark Carney’s criticism of over-regulation of the banking sector, which concurred with his own Eurosceptic views. It was a 24-carat example of the ability of an adept politician to have it both ways.

Theresa May was a candidate for the same dubious award. She managed a political double-flip. She attacked the Metropolitan Police commissioner for saying knife crime has risen since politicians reined in stop-and-search policing. Wrong, she insisted, as though assertion were proof. What she meant was that stop-and-search might lessen knife crime but police harassing black youths causes more problems than it solves. But suggesting “a few people being stabbed is less important than community cohesion” would obviously not be a very clever thing for a Tory politician to say.

And yet she was happy to invert that logic on the issue of Islamic radicalism. Her measures to crack down on the radicalisation of young Muslims – imposing banning orders on non-violent radicals, closing mosques, insisting schools report extremists – seem designed to alienate Islamic moderates – the only people with a realistic chance of convincing young Muslims that radical views are invalid.

For any politician, consistency usually comes second to pandering to the prejudices of supporters. That is why David Cameron’s message to China is, “Invest in the UK and you’ll make lots of money” but his memo to himself is, “Don’t invest in the UK and you’ll save lots of money.” And he says it while waving goodbye to Britain’s steel industry, in a way Angela Merkel would not countenance in Germany.

But elsewhere, the PM was too bold to take the prize for political duplicity. He can be brazen in dismissing experts. When Anglican bishops told him to allow in more migrants he told them they were plain wrong, then rejected a Public Health England report calling for a sugar tax without even reading it. Perhaps he’s emboldened by his Chancellor, George Osborne, who seems set on holding firm line on cuts to working tax credits, despite a growing revolt by Tory backbenchers who fear not only the embarrassment of the pasty tax but the fatality of the poll tax. Osborne, mono-focused on eliminating the deficit, knows if he crumbles after round one of his cuts he won’t be able to be brutal in future rounds.

To Otto von Bismarck, politics was the art of the possible. Today, politics is the art of the plausible. Which is why to be Politician of the Week is not an accolade but a reproof. Osborne may be wrong, but at least we know where we are with him.