‘My contacts are my superpower’: An interview with Andrew Griffith

If the facts of life are conservative then Andrew Griffith is the man entrusted to remind voters of that truth. The new shadow chancellor’s political hero is David Young, the entrepreneur turned trade secretary. ‘Others bring me problems,’ Margaret Thatcher supposedly said, ‘David brings me solutions.’ Griffith’s task is to do the same for Kemi Badenoch as she seeks to reclaim the mantle of fiscal responsibility. When we meet in parliament, Griffith is a hive of activity: phone blazing, eyes darting as he juggles assorted engagements. A former chief operating officer at Sky and chairman of Just Eat, he has an address book full of City contacts. ‘They’re part of my sources of information as to what’s going on in the economy,’ he says. ‘I think that’s a bit of a superpower. It’s rare for somebody who has stalked the boardrooms of British companies to now be in Westminster.’ As the UK’s borrowing costs soar, Griffith is keen to present himself as a deficit hawk. ‘I hear no other party of British politics today talking about reducing the deficit,’ the 55-year-old says. ‘As a country we are walking along a fiscal cliff edge. And the Conservative party is the only party, under Kemi and I, who are talking about taking serious action.’ For every £1 saved through public-spending cuts, the Tories want 50p to go towards reducing the deficit. Griffith says he and Kemi Badenoch work ‘seamlessly… We can finish each other’s sentences’ It is a marked shift from recent years, when Tory attitudes to public spending grew more relaxed after Brexit and Covid. Given popular resentment of austerity, can Griffith really sell this argument? ‘You’ve got to level with the British people about the state we’re in,’ he says, aware of the ‘danger that the UK gilt market becomes the equivalent of a flyover state’ as ‘people don’t have to buy the UK’s debt in the way they used to’. He resents ministers ‘falsely’ comparing the UK with the G7 group of nations: ‘a contest to be the tallest dwarf’. Instead, he prefers the more dynamic economies of the G20, which offer ‘a lower level of tax on a sounder fiscal footing’. Lessons from Lisbon and Stockholm are inspiring his thoughts on fiscal consolidation as he bleakly notes how Britain’s borrowing costs are now higher than each of the PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. ‘We are at the bottom of the sty in terms of our borrowing costs,’ he says, ‘and as a patriot that pains me.’ Most popular Madeline Grant Andy Burnham’s cry for help at PMQs John Power Is the Traitors racist? Alexander Fiske-Harrison Reactions to the tiger attack have been grotesque and misanthropic Griffith mixes boosterish optimism with clear-eyed realism about Britain’s woes. He is reading 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed about the Viennese stock market collapse that triggered the first global financial crash. He rises around 5 a.m. and works from his standing desk in parliament surrounded by a bust of Adam Smith, a draft bill abolishing the BBC licence fee and a model jet plane – a reminder of the need to properly fund defence. He intends to pursue Chancellor John Healey on this, as Tory strategists seek to exploit the gap between talk of ending ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ with briefings about ‘a careful Budget that does as little harm as possible’. The Labour criticism of Griffith can be summed up in two words: Liz Truss. The Sussex MP served under her as a junior minister in the Treasury, though he had limited involvement in her mini-Budget. Like others who shadow the offices they served, Griffith wants to turn past experience into a positive. His thinking is still evolving on the machinery of government changes but he is clear on the need for more data and more dynamic modelling. ‘The Treasury could do a great deal more to raise its game in terms of modelling the second and third order effects from its decisions and then being able to engage with the OBR on the back of that,’ he says, citing the case of tax-free shopping and its broader impact in attracting rich individuals to Britain. ‘We need a lot more people who’ve got a background as financial analysts and in quantitative modelling,’ he says. Other plans are a change to Treasury recruitment policy to mandate degrees such as maths and engineering which bring high financial literacy. Outside Whitehall, the Tories have bolstered their supply-side offer too. Griffith’s thinking borrows both from the Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets scattered around his office and the Looking for Growth campaign group. Free-marketeers cheered his plans to abolish Natural England and build a third Heathrow runway but such radicalism will need to survive contact in southern and eastern seats such as his own. In this mission, Griffith at least knows he can count on the confidence of Kemi Badenoch. ‘I can see Kemi wanting a handle on the Treasury,’ remarks one former aide. Griffith says the pair work ‘seamlessly… We can finish each other’s sentences and we speak almost every day, including weekends.’ He is also one of the few Tory MPs respected by Nigel Farage, having stuck up for him in the 2023 NatWest ‘debanking’ row. Not all in Reform are so positive, with Robert Jenrick’s team plotting to upstage his Budget coverage. ‘I’ve conducted a full investigation into myself and found no wrongdoing.’ Amid briefings about the Tories going after ‘Waitrose women’, the shadow chancellor rejects claims that his party’s inheritance tax cuts are explicitly aimed at winning back Lib Dem seats. ‘Our approach to the economy is rooted in principle. It’s not about a clever coalition of individual policies designed to appeal to a tapestry of seats. That’s not me.’ Both he and his aides make a virtue of the fact that he is not a politician. He describes himself as ‘not necessarily cut from Spad-like political cloth’, rather ‘a team player and someone who deals straight with colleagues’. He has two kids in their twenties: when he speaks of the ‘Covid generation’, he feels it personally. A new Tory focus on young people’s jobs is aimed at winning over their parents. A child of the 1970s, Griffith is keenly aware of history repeating itself, as plenty of his City contemporaries flee Britain for more fruitful pastures overseas: ‘There are far too many of my friends and peers who are sending me pictures from the Dolomites, or showing me the construction of their villa in Corfu, when they could be making a productive contribution to the UK economy.’ His mission, like the late Lord Young, is to match his business success with political acumen and hone a strategy that can get his own iron lady into No. 10. He might then, finally, be able to achieve his longtime goal of delivering a true Tory Budget over a tipple of his favourite Sussex sparkling wine.