Paymaster General

And speaking of money, here's just how seriously that money used to be taken.

Paymaster General for naval and army procurement during the painful period I was referring to, basically the Napoleonic Wars.

If you misappropriated funds from the Paymaster General, the penalty was death.

So we've scaled back our remedial system, at least in some senses.

the penalty for misappropriating treasury funds used to be death.

In this case, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

By the late 90s, he'd already had a long career in corporate finance with various investment banks and was developing a close relationship with New Labour, not least in a fun episode – you'll like this one, Nova – where he was acting as the trustee of the offshore financial interests of the then Paymaster General at Treasury, Geoffrey Robinson.

Robinson provided a massive, secret £400,000 loan to the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry so that he could buy a house in Notting Hill.

Wait,

Welcome to Tuesday's Cross Question with me, Ian Dale.

We have on the panel with us James Murray, Labour Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster General.

He signs all the cheques, apparently.

We might hear more detail on that in a minute.

Now with us in the, I was going to say in the studio, it's sort of studio, isn't it, here on our stand in Liverpool.

It's actually, it's much bigger than it used to be at these conferences.

We have James Murray, Labour Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster General and MP for Ealing North.

Now, you were a great Starmerite, weren't you, James? And you were one of the people that the Starmer government always put up on the media.