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John Glen: Politician under pressure to find Brexit answers for the Square Mile

John Glen has had a surreal six months
John Glen has had a surreal six months

MINISTERS aren’t usually averse to publicity but John Glen has had rather too much of it lately. The man responsible for the City of London, who is also Conservative MP for Salisbury, has had an “absolutely surreal” six months as the sleepy Wiltshire city found itself at the centre of a real-life James Bond plot involving Russian agents, Novichok poisonings and international intrigue.

When the Russian suspects gave their “preposterous” interview last week, Glen had to fit a dozen interviews around his red boxes and meetings.

More embarrassingly, he also blew the gaff on the Government’s no-deal planning when he was snapped with a long lens heading to a meeting, sharing the luridly named Operation Yellowhammer with the world. Will ministers ever learn?

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Sitting in his office at the far end of the Treasury’s ministerial corridor he laughed it off: “I don’t comment on leaks, even when I’m subject to them.” At least it shows there’s “a lot of work” going into planning for all scenarios, he said.

This weekend the job takes a more conventional turn as Glen is off to Asia to fly the flag for the Square Mile in a five-day sprint across three countries.

He touches down in Indonesia for 24 hours to see the finance minister, then jets off to Malaysia for meetings with sovereign wealth funds and banks including HSBC and Standard Chartered. Then it’s onto Japan for ministerial head-to-heads and a sit-down with Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda. Finally, he’s addressing Finsum, Japan’s biggest FinTech conference.

Glen said the point of the trip is to “exploit growing markets,” to “promote the City and send them a message that we’re keen to continue to do business”. To be fair to him, with a schedule like that, we taxpayers are getting our money’s worth.

As Economic Secretary to the Treasury, he’s fifth in the ministerial pecking order at Horse Guards Road, but City types seem keener on him than some of his recent predecessors such as Simon Kirby, the over-dressed but under-briefed minister who was kicked out by Brighton voters last year.

Turnover has been high and 44-year-old Glen, who “swapped museums for MiFID” when he joined from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in January, points out that if he gets to 17 months he’ll be the longest serving City minister for 15 years.

But as the Square Mile faces its biggest upheaval in decades, he has City lobbyists hammering on his door demanding clarity on the UK’s future relationship with the EU — answers which he isn’t able to give for now. “He’s very open to the sector and good at coming along and talking to us, although he may not understand the urgency with which these questions need to be answered,” says one.

Glen definitely gets it but others have fiercer criticisms with the way the Government has lowered its sights on financial services.

Passporting of City firms into the EU will go with the UK’s exit from the Single Market. But this year the UK also pushed for “mutual recognition”, where each side accepts the other’s rules and regulations (dismissed by the EU as a “have-cake-and-eat-it” approach).

Instead Theresa May’s Chequers plan aims for a more distant relationship under a souped-up version of “equivalence”, where the EU decides if the UK’s rules meet its standards. The plan was comprehensively snubbed by EU leaders in Salzburg this week and the IMF reckons UK financial exports to the EU could fall by 40%.

“Ask him why Chequers has sold us down the river,” fumes one frustrated City type. Unsurprisingly, Glen disagrees: “Politics always has to be a blend of ideology and pragmatism. What’s important now is that we respect that we were making no progress on mutual recognition, but we get an enduring bilateral relationship that allows City institutions certainty over how they manage regulatory change.

“When you talk to City figures, heads of banks, insurance companies, despite the fact that there is a brief period of disorientation around where we’re going, they quickly realise that we had to be pragmatic. We are not selling anyone down the river. We are finding pragmatic solutions to give them what they need.” But for a man who said he’s “proud to go in to bat for such a critical sector” isn’t it frustrating to be managing decline?

“I’m not managing decline at all. The point of my trip next week is to maximise global opportunities. The question presupposes that the growth of the City is in the EU. They are valued partners and we want a strong working relationship with them but we have to look beyond that partnership as well.”

So will Asian growth make up for lost EU business? He doesn’t answer but instead talks about “enormous opportunities”.

Will the UK be less attractive to financial firms after Brexit? That too is swerved: “I’m not in the business of making predictions. I’m in the business of trying to be as positive as I can about the City in the future. It doesn’t do the country any good for me to be negative or morose.” It’s an exercise in fence- sitting that befits a man with portraits of both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II on his wall.

He does have some crumbs for the City, however, as he plays down the chances of a no-deal Brexit. There are “deep ongoing discussions” between officials “working step-by-step to resolve conflict areas”.

“The EU famously take things to the wire. All I can say is that every week I’ve been in this job I have had detailed conversations with officials about solutions to some of the challenges that exist.”

That said, “all businesses, all institutions, need to take account of every scenario”. The Treasury is preparing to lay 70 statutory instruments — secondary legislation — to prepare for the worst outcome. He adds: “There’s a difference between prudent contingency arrangements and the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit.” Fingers crossed he’s right.

Although most of the City is fervently pro-Remain, Glen calls himself a “reluctant Remainer”. He bats away calls for a second referendum as “totally impractical and unnecessary” but also challenges hard Brexiteers to come up with their own alternatives. His willingness to toe the party line is understandable given he had to wait seven years to be a minister; he admits he was getting “pretty fed up” when overlooked in David Cameron’s last reshuffle.

That said, sounding off at Cameron in 2010 soon after winning Salisbury probably didn’t help his chances much. He complained: “I’m a white, Christian, married bloke from the Home Counties so I don’t fit the description of what the leadership wants at the moment.”

He wasn’t originally on the party’s A-list of candidates either — his face didn’t fit the modernising push — and he was also one of 136 Conservative MPs who voted against gay marriage in 2013.

At least his time on the backbenches allowed him stints as a bag-carrier to senior ministers, acting as the eyes and ears in Parliament to big-hitters including Chancellor Philip Hammond, whom he knows “extremely well”.

As the son of a hairdresser and small businessman selling plant pots he comes from a “fairly modest” background, but a passion for politics first emerged more than 30 years earlier with a trip to Parliament as a Bath schoolboy. He got into Oxford on the second attempt and sports his Mansfield College cufflinks in the interview.

In business, he split his time between being a consultant for Accenture, where he worked for strategy director Mark Spelman (the husband of Tory MP Caroline) and secondments to the Conservative Party, running its research department — although in his 2010 vent he also said he knew “his days would be numbered” at party headquarters after Cameron took over.

Of his stuttering early career in Parliament, Glen says “the bottom line is you’ve got to make the best of what you’re given”. Unfortunately when it comes to Brexit — for all the minister’s optimism — the City looks like it is facing the same thin gruel.