David Gauke's schoolboy interest in taxation

The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, David Gauke MP, introduced his speech at the ICAEW's 2012 Hardman memorial lecture with an amusing recollection.

He said:

My first experience of tax policy was, as a schoolboy, listening to Philip Hardman’s analyses of the Budgets of the 1980s.

Now I don’t want to give a false impression that, as a teenager, I had a precocious interest in tax matters, or that I rushed home from school for the sole purpose of watching a discussion about the tax changes contained in a Budget. I like to think I was pretty normal for my age. And that my interests were fairly typical for a teenage boy – cricket, football, girls and, of course, macroeconomics.