Shortly after Theresa May appointed Andrew Percy as Minister for the Northern Powerhouse in July 2016, Percy called the architect of the policy, Jim O’Neill, to ask his advice. “He was supposed to be going up North to talk in a number of cities,” O’Neill recalls, “and Number 10 had told him, the day before he was due to go, that he couldn’t use the phrase ‘Northern Powerhouse’. So he called me up to say, ‘what should I do?’ And I said, ‘maybe you should get a new job, mate’… jokingly.” However friendly the remark might have been, O’Neill found himself at odds with May’s chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who he said “tried to kill” the Northern Powerhouse project. He resigned from the Treasury two months later.
That O’Neill was the first of May’s ministers to leave should have been an omen for the new PM; the former Goldman Sachs chief economist has long been valued as an expert in recognising where things are headed. In 2001 he famously predicted that the “BRIC” (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries would overtake the leading Western economies in 30 years. The insight was only strengthened by the global financial crisis – in 2010, the Financial Times reported that “during the great re-reckoning, the Brics concept has flourished”. In 2011, as the Greek debt crisis began to pull at the seams of the Eurozone, O’Neill pointed out that China’s growth produced “the equivalent of another Greece every 12.5 weeks”. More recently, his favourite fact is that “Germany’s number one trading partner is now China; Germany exports more to China than it does to Italy.”
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