Yahoo News Classic Jeremy-Pokery as Hunt gives with one hand while taking with the other
Jeremy Hunt began his Autumn Statement with a deep dive into cringe. He began by referring to his wife – the woman whose nationality he famously once forgot – saying “unlike me, she’s looking younger every year”. This was budgetary responsibility delivered in the style of a father of the bride speech.
Still, as with the best of that genre, as it wore on Mr Hunt seemed to be getting people on side. A hat tip to the Office for Budget Responsibility, shout-outs to MPs whose lobbying efforts had been successful: this was all a long way from Kwasi Kwarteng’s equivalent offering last year, which in terms of winning friends and influencing was more “murder spree” than “charm offensive”.
One group remained distinctly un-wooed by Uncle Jeremy, mostly because they were at the receiving end of his better gags.
He took a pop at Rachel Reeves for failing to mention inflation in her speech at Liverpool – and for lifting chunks of her book from Wikipedia. “My conference speech was before hers,” oiled Mr Hunt, “so all she had to do was a bit of copying and pasting which I’ve heard she’s good at.”
Across the floor, Ms Reeves grimaced and Sir Keir Starmer scowled into the middle distance. Newest shadow treasury minion Darren Jones slumped, head in hand; they looked like the Three Stooges on an off day. All of which bodes well for the opposition’s ability to take a joke in government.
Crowd-pleasers followed: a freeze in alcohol duty, welcome relief for the self-employed, sizeable business tax cuts, and finally the big reveal – a 2 per cent cut to National Insurance. The Chancellor attributed this newfound largesse to “a growing economy”. (Don’t forget to thank fiscal drag too, Jeremy).
All big talk, but there was one tiny little problem in the midst of it, the trace of myxomatosis in the rabbit in the hat. The overall tax burden is actually set to rise. So what this really amounted to was giving with one hand while taking with the other – classic Jeremy-Pokery.
Aside from sickly rabbits, the other member of Mr Hunt’s unlikely menagerie was an elephant in the room: the upcoming election.
The shadow chancellor’s reply is always a big ask; listening to the announcements before belting out a laundry list of complaints moments later, regardless of what was just said. Reeves duly began by criticising things that hadn’t happened. Though inheritance tax remained untouched, she sulked that cutting it had been “their first instinct”, and had a go at Mr Hunt for previously talking about raising National Insurance, before changing tack on that too. But it meant she was shouting at policies that didn’t exist.
Such criticism is an especially tough sell when the shadow chancellor’s voice grates like Ms Reeves’s does. Imagine an anguished stoat stuck inside a giant sinus. Close your eyes and you might have been listening to the Leader of the Opposition.
Ms Reeves may in fact be a mythical creature dreamt up by New Labour; a sphinx or chimaera combining the voice of Sir Starmer with the policies of Gordon Brown and the bob of Cherie Blair. She even went full Keir and boasted of having worked at the Bank of England, which is fast becoming the new “When I was Director of Public Prosecutions”.
Still, Ms Reeves had the last laugh in her summing-up remarks with a simple question to listeners. “Are my family better off after 13 years of the Conservatives? Does anything in Britain work better than it did 13 years ago?” This is Labour’s trump card, and nothing else really matters.
