Matthew d'Ancona: Philip Hammond has done his best in a dysfunctional government

More than most Chancellors delivering a Budget, Philip Hammond looked today like a man captive to, rather than shaping, the political and economic context in which he spoke. There were jokes aplenty, delivered with confidence —but they were no more than a distraction from the gloom and dysfunction that afflicts this government.

To an absurd extent, the Chancellor was tasked by his own colleagues with restoring Theresa May’s administration to vigorous health with a single Commons speech. But that was never within his power — is it within anyone’s? — and imposed entirely phoney expectations upon a budget that was never going to be more than workmanlike.

Operating as best he could within the parameters of fiscal reality — sharply-reduced growth forecasts, in particular — Hammond reeled off a series of worthy proposals. To help prepare Britain for the scientific and technological demands of the post-Brexit era, schools will receive £600 for each extra pupil they persuade to take maths A level.

To narrow the productivity gap — Hammond’s abiding obsession — there will be £1,000 career development grants for teachers in areas where standards need to be raised urgently. As widely-trailed, the Chancellor announced measures to speed up property development and the construction of 300,000 new homes a year. Housing should be at the heart of the Government’s political strategy, the best possible response to the sense of intergenerational injustice that helped drive up Jeremy Corbyn’s share of the vote in the election.

The new railcard for 26- to 30-year-olds will surely be welcomed but voters in that age category fret more about the property ladder and how to secure a place on it as they start to have families. The politics of the Eighties were energised by the revolution of council-house sales. The politics of our own time present a broader dilemma: the fear of a generation that it may never own property. What the Chancellor announced today is no more than a start.

As he had to, Hammond addressed the scandalous delay of up to six weeks for recipients of universal credit with a fund of £1.5 billion: a small but necessary step away from technocracy and towards social justice. There were measures to encourage research and development and embrace the potential of artificial intelligence. For the NHS, the Chancellor pledged £10 billion in capital investment, an emergency spree of £2.8 bilion for the NHS and a conditional pay rise for nurses.

Looming over all this was a profound — and profoundly unhealthy — mood of unreality. Hammond finds himself wading through the swamp of the post-truth era, in which emotions trump facts, and rational policy debate is swamped by political zeal.

For weeks, he has been simultaneously warned that he must be Tiggerish about the economy and its prospects after Brexit — but that he deserves to be sacked if he makes a single error. Not even Tigger would have been reckless enough to bounce through a minefield in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Yet the Chancellor’s internal party opponents see no contradiction in their demands for flamboyance and surgical precision. It used to be an immutable rule of politics that to govern was to choose. To an alarming extent, those who occupy the great offices of state are now applauded by their own side when they demonstrate a gift for doublethink: the capacity to hold two completely contradictory points of view.

Too many of Hammond’s colleagues expected him to deliver a budget of radicalism, with little apparent care for the limitations of the parliamentary arithmetic delivered in June. To be fair to the Chancellor, he was conspicuously, excluded from the election campaign — a campaign that failed to celebrate sufficiently his party’s hard-won economic achievement since 2010 and the fall of the deficit by two-thirds from its post-Crash levels.

With a comparable indifference to logic, Hammond’s critics want him to trigger a housing bonanza — but not to upset Tory voters who live in the green belt or to give councils too much latitude to borrow and build. Quite rightly, Tory MPs would be appalled if he suddenly squandered the gains of the past seven years, principally achieved by fiscal conservatism and monetary activism. They understand the abiding appeal of tax-cutting and welcomed the increase of the personal allowance to £11,850 and the higher rate threshold to £46,350.

Yet they also expect Hammond to find a blue magical money tree, to match Corbyn’s red-leaved orchard. Those who campaigned for Leave in the referendum are desperate to justify their ludicrous pledge of a £350 million per week dividend for the NHS when we leave the EU. Too many of them demand a quick-fix end to austerity — without acknowledging the risk to economic stability that such a populist flourish would entail.

All chancellors face such political dilemmas but the atmosphere in which this Budget has been prepared and delivered has revealed a pathological refusal to confront the harsh facts. Hammond is routinely accused of failing to enthuse sufficiently about Brexit, and of jeopardising the nation’s economic prospects by failing to dance a merry jig of excitement about its departure from the EU.

Yet it is the imminence of Brexit itself that has chilled the economy, not the Chancellor’s personality. In the past year, Britain has experienced the slowest growth of the G7 countries, weighed down by inflation, business uncertainty, the fall in the pound, and declining living standards.

Hammond often speaks of the need to “future-proof” the economy and maintain “head-room” to accommodate the unpredictable consequences of Brexit. That head-room is shrinking dramatically, for reasons that are mostly beyond his control. There was little intrinsically wrong with today’s Budget. But – as Hammond well knows – it was no more than a well-intentioned situation report, delivered on the road to a world of bleak uncertainty.