By then, May was also being lobbied hard to call an election by two of her most senior ministers, Philip Hammond and David Davis. ‘It was a pincer move,’ a ministerial aide recalled. The chancellor urged May to take the plunge as early as January, complaining that the ‘fiscal straitjacket’ left behind by the Cameron government, which banned him from raising income tax, National Insurance and VAT, had left him too little room for manoeuvre if Brexit led to a downturn – a view reinforced by the chaos of the budget. Hammond told her, ‘You can’t get tax changes through, you’ve got no flexibility,
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