'I'll miss the drama' Head of IFS sums up 14 years of unpicking fiscal policy

In my lifetime, who have been the big chancellors?muses Paul Johnson, as the outgoing director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) prepares to hang up his spreadsheets.

- Heather Stewart

"You've had Healey, Lawson, Clarke, Brown. Arguably Osborne. We haven't had one since then. They're the long-lasting ones."

The fact that Rachel Reeves is not on that list will elicit no surprise in 11 Downing Street, where Johnson is seen as a nitpicking critic, naive about the constraints of politics.

Supremely confident and resolutely wonkish, the 58-year-old Johnson has exuded a baffled frustration at the standard of political debate about fiscal policy throughout his 14 years at the top of the IFS thinktank. He is critical of George Osborne's deep spending cuts, which had "really negative long-term effects" on some public services. But he praises the Tory chancellor's single-mindedness.

"You knew where he was coming from, because he had a pretty clear idea on the fiscal side, at least: we're doing austerity, we're bringing the size of the state back down to where it was pre-financial crisis and we're largely doing that through spending cuts."

By contrast, he expresses exasperation with Labour's partial U-turn on the winter fuel allowance - though he admits the pressure to change course was external.

"I don't think people have any sense of scale," he laments. "This was a small thing - a billion pounds or so - which is now going to make virtually no savings at all."

Reeves took the public by surprise when she announced the allowance cut, blaming what she said was a £22bn black hole in the public finances. Johnson, once a Treasury civil servant, concedes that there was some information the chancellor could not have known about before Labour came to power, but argues both major parties were well aware there was a reckoning coming.