08:51

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has been advised to avoid becoming a “creature of No 10” at next month’s budget by steering clear of raising government spending to satisfy Boris Johnson’s demands.

David Gauke, the former justice secretary and Treasury minister who was expelled from the Conservatives for defying Johnson over Brexit, said Sunak was in danger of putting the public finances on an unsustainable path should he pump up government borrowing by too much to meet the prime minister’s spending demands. Gauke said:

You have got a new chancellor who will want to establish that he is not a creature of No 10. [Sunak], I would imagine, would want to assert that independence, if not necessarily on 11 March, sooner rather than later.

Speaking at an event at the Resolution Foundation thinktank in London, Gauke said that the government’s plans to increase spending could result in the national debt as a proportion of GDP increasing, which could be dangerous before a potential economic downturn.

Now that is a very strange position to find ourselves in. It’s a very strange position for a Conservative government to find itself in in particular. [There are] fundamental constraints here. The Treasury is going to have to continue to do the job the Treasury has done in the last 10 years, of being pretty tight with public spending, and making sure we do prioritise.

Gauke also said that the Ministry of Justice had faced a funding settlement that was “essentially unsustainable”. He said prisoner numbers would increase as Boris Johnson’s government toughened up sentencing criteria, meaning more prison officers would be needed. “Those pressures are going to increase yet further,” he added.