I reported earlier today that George Osborne is set to take up the Sovereign Wealth Fund idea set out in the ConservativeHome Manifesto. Jesse Norman took to Twitter to say that he got there first – in 2011, 2010 and 2008. However, Mark Fox, our occasional contributor, revealed via that medium that he got there even earlier – in 1997. Future generations of historians will labour to establish which Tory sage first leaped from his bath, Archimedes-like, and hurtled naked into the streets to proclaim the virtues of a Sovereign Wealth Fund.
(This site’s readers, who are never slow on the uptake, will have spotted that we didn’t claim to have invented the idea – merely to have drawn it to the Chancellor’s attention. But I digress.)
However, one person who will not be hurtling to the streets for this purpose, naked or otherwise, is Mark Reckless of Rochester by-election fame. As readers will see, he tweeted this morning against a Sovereign Wealth Fund, in reply to our piece. However – as some of those same readers pointed out – UKIP policy supports one. I appreciate that the party’s house is one in which a hundred flowers bloom. None the less, it may not be a good idea for the man who, if he wins next week, will be the Party’s second most senior MP to take a different view to its leadership.