Why is Sajid Javid making economic promises he can’t keep?

I don’t think I want to speculate,” is how Dr Arno Hantzsche responded when asked by The Independent why on earth the chancellor, Sajid Javid, would promise to more than double the UK’s economic growth to 2.8 per cent.

The principal economist for the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (Niesr) was speaking after that august body released its assessment of his prospects. It won’t surprise you to learn that it took a dim view of them.

The chancellor is widely expected to splash the cash in next month’s Budget in an attempt to put a little juice into an economy that has been showing some modest signs of life – with an emphasis on the modest.

But Niesr thinks that the damage from Brexit will eclipse benefit from the investment we’ve been primed to expect by a factor of 10.

Let’s be charitable for a moment and imagine that the UK does a lot better than everyone (including Niesr) expects to the extent that growth gets up to, I don’t know, 2.5 per cent by the end of the current parliament.

This would represent a remarkable result. An objective analyst could be forgiven for wondering if Javid got his degree from Hogwarts rather than the University of Exeter.

Trouble is, having set the unrealistic target of 2.8 per cent, there’s not much political credit to be gleaned from delivering 2.5.

If Labour can get itself a decent leader and that leader finds a decent shadow chancellor (the party’s not completely bereft of candidates), the target will provide him or her enough with enough red meat to keep McDonald’s UK business supplied for the next five years.

Perhaps Javid is hoping it’ll be Rebecca Long-Bailey and she’ll let him off the hook.

It’s confounding in the extreme. After all, while the cabinet in which he serves boasts some proper thickos (as cabinets usually do), Javid is not one of them. Nor is he an economic illiterate, as many of his colleagues appear to be.

Before entering politics, he had a long career in the City and made a ton of money while he was there. You don’t get hired to £3m a year positions in the square mile without being in possession of a very sharp and sound mind.

Did he leave it somewhere during the election campaign? Or is he just being very cynical? Cynicism is, after all, something of a virtue in banking.

If he is, it’s possible that he’s taken that view that 2.8 per cent is just a number and no one will really notice or care if he doesn’t achieve it as long as they mostly keep their jobs and their ability to keep their mortgages ticking over.

One thing the Brexit debate exposed is that the public doesn’t really connect with economics. There aren’t many numbers that resonate. The Bank of England knocking a quarter of a point off interest rates is an exception to that rule. But the Bank of England knocking a couple of pips off its growth forecast? It excites only a relatively small circle of journalists and City types who live in the eco-universe.

Ditto the upward or downward revisions to growth that the Office for National Statistics puts out. And Javid mightn’t be in the job when the chickens come home to roost anyway.

If you were being really Machiavellian about interpreting his motivations, he’s potentially made life very difficult for whichever of his acolytes Boris Johnson installs as Javid’s replacement the next time the chancellor upsets adviser-in-chief Dominic Cummings.

But there is one more potential reason for him making such an unrealisable promise. It is that he’s drunk a tanker full of Brexit kool-aid and actually believes the economic fairy stories the ideologues have been telling people. Or that he felt forced into it by those around the table who have.

That may be the truth of it, and a government so thoroughly divorced from reality is a scary prospect indeed.