South West Surrey MP Jeremy Hunt is the fourth chancellor in four months. Assuming he remains in place under new prime minister Rishi Sunak he is likely to measure success in terms of jobs, economic growth and ultimately opinion polls and then votes when the next general election comes around, in 2024, if not earlier.

Investors will be looking to their portfolios to gauge the effect of his policies. Mr Hunt’s first-day hat-trick of share prices up, sterling up and gilt yields down (17 October) was a good start, as he calmed markets with a return to something that looked like fiscal orthodoxy and promises of some numbers that would actually add up, come the now planned Autumn Statement and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s independent analysis, on 17 November.

But there is still work to be done before jokes about the UK turning into an emerging market stop being funny and start turning serious.

Lessons of history

Jeremy Hunt is the 20th chancellor since the inception of the FTSE All-Share index in 1962. Fourteen of his predecessors have been Conservative and five Labour. Whether he will match Gordon Brown for longevity remains to be seen, as the Labour chancellor held office for 3,708 days from 1997 to 2007, but he’ll certainly be hopeful of outlasting his Conservative predecessor, Kwasi Kwarteng, who managed just 38 days.

Fourteen of his predecessors have been Conservative and five Labour, so the public has, so far, preferred to have the Tories in office and in charge of the nation’s finances. At first glance, from investor's point of view, there is little in it between the two parties’ financial stewardship.

Under Conservative chancellors, the FTSE All-Share has chalked up a total capital gain of 354%, in nominal terms. That equates to an average advance per chancellor of 27% (and the average is dragged down by the short tenure of both Nadhim Zahawi and Kwasi Kwarteng).

Under Labour the benchmark has risen by 161% for an average gain of 32.2%. Across 36 years of Tory chancellorships that is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.3% against 4.1% under 24 years of Labour in 11 Downing Street and two of the top-five best spells under a single Chancellor come under Labour, again in nominal terms.

However, the picture changes profoundly when inflation is taken into account and capital returns from the FTSE All-Share are assessed in real (post-inflation) terms rather than nominal ones.

Here, Conservative chancellors come out well on top, as the withering effect of inflation upon investors’ returns from the stock market under Labour’s Healey chancellorship of the mid-to-late 1970s comes into play, even if Labour supporters will argue his record is tarnished by the need to tackle the mess left behind by the Conservatives’ Anthony Barber’s crack-up boom and the oil price spike of the early seventies.

The Barber boom and its legacy was one reason why the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget frightened markets, as inflation was already lofty before the stimulatory, tax-cutting plan, which conjured up the spectre of more inflation and faster interest rate increases, even as the economy potentially slowed. From the narrow perspective of investors, inflation also chewed up the nominal gains made by the FTSE All-Share under Barber (and under one of his Conservative successors, Geoffrey Howe, for that matter).

Investors could therefore be forgiven for wishing Hunt to look back to, and learn from, the experiences of both Barber and Healey, as, helped by the Bank of England, he attempts to steer the economy between the twin threats of inflation on one side and recession on the other.

Misery Index

The economist Arthur Okun’s Misery Index could be a useful tool to measure the chancellor’s progress. It simply adds together the prevailing rate of inflation to the prevailing rate of unemployment, to remind all that full employment is no guarantee of content if there is inflation and that low inflation is no guarantee of happiness (or political success) if unemployment is high.

The Misery index, based on the last published unemployment rate of 3.5% and the last retail price index inflation reading of 12.4%, is 15.5% (RPI is no longer an officially recognised statistic, but the dataset has a longer history that CPI).

That is the highest reading since 1991 when the UK was in a deep recession, and one that was resolved, at least in part, by the devaluation of sterling after its inglorious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. If the Misery Index starts to drag down Hunt, then sterling could be quick to show further strain.

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