Jonathan Portes fired as NIESR director

So farewell, then, Jonathan Portes. As CoffeeHousers may know, he was chief economist in the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown but in recent years he has been director of the NIESR, an economic research institute, which he used as a platform to continue leftist attacks against conservatives. He pretty much lives on Twitter, when he’s not bothering press regulators with nit-picking complaints against people with whom he disagrees. The NIESR seems to have finally had enough of being hijacked for his partisan purposes. It has announced his departure ‘by mutual consent and with immediate effect’. Okay, maybe ‘announced’ is overstating things: it has inserted a sly paragraph in the ‘about us’ section of its website to say, as you do, that…

 “Following a strategic review, the Council of Management announced on 5 October 2015, that in order to enable NIESR to move forward to meet the challenges it faces, Jonathan Portes would be leaving his position as Director of NIESR by mutual consent and with immediate effect.”

Frances Cairncross, a recently-ennobled economist and former journalist, has been named NIESR interim director – which is some indication of the speed at which they wanted to move. Portes, who has been tweeting away today and yesterday, has not yet broken the news: he has merely updated his biog. So what could have triggered it all? A few months ago, Portes was lampooned by Niall Ferguson in The Spectator as the ‘master of political correction’ – an article which exposed his tactics and questioned why a charitable (and, ergo, apolitical) organisation like the NIESR had turned into an attack dog. The trustees of the NIESR, it seems, have finally asked the same question. UPDATE Another version of events says that Portes was fired because he was driving NIESR into the ground financially – via the very same borrow-and-spend tactics he unceasingly recommends.

The fact is that NIESR has been losing money during his tenancy. This has eaten into the endowment it uses to fund itself…So, seeing the Institute’s endowment being burnt away at an unsustainable rate, and seeing frictions emerging within the staff as money ran dry, the council that oversees the running of NIESR took action. There was a “frank exchange of views”; eventually the Council lost patience with their director.