Voices: Jeremy Hunt’s four Es are exceptionally, entirely, egregiously empty

Whenever a politician chooses to give a speech at Bloomberg HQ in central London, they risk inflicting a quite profound trauma on their audience.

It is almost 10 years to the day since David Cameron gave his Bloomberg speech, the one in which he announced that he’d probably be holding an in/out referendum on EU membership at some point but hadn’t really thought very much about when, or how, or indeed why – a reality that persisted right up until the moment he found he had taken his country out of the EU by mistake.

Bloomberg HQ isn’t even in the same building any more, but it does have the same computer system, which remembers the photograph it takes for visitors’ passes and then, should you return, prints out the same one.

Which means that, when Jeremy Hunt decided he had some very important meaningless waffle to announce about the economy this morning, the mood of the occasion was already one of Back to the Future meets Sliding Doors meets Mad Max: Fury Road. I am told that at least one attendee really did sit through the speech wearing around their neck a black-and-white picture of their own face on that fateful morning in 2013; as if anybody possibly needs reminding that things really didn’t have to be this way.

Jeremy Hunt wasn’t there 10 years ago. As health secretary at the time, he’d given his own speech a few days before, about how the NHS really did need to get with the times and get a modern computer system (which he would later spend around £6bn on before discovering it didn’t really work and then scrapping it).

But still, one wonders how he might have felt had he been shown, back then, a photograph of himself doing what he did this morning. Knowing that there he would be, as chancellor of the Exchequer, taking a short break from his usual routine of borrowing billions of pounds a month to pay back the interest on the billions of pounds he’d borrowed the month before that, to make an important speech that would mainly be about “Brexit opportunities”.

That he, Jeremy Hunt – a generally speaking quite sane human being – would be standing up there and explaining that, yes, everything was kind of destroyed, but nobody should worry because he was going to fix it by rebuilding the economy to take advantage of the opportunities of Brexit.

Of course he wouldn’t have believed it, but he needn’t get too disheartened, because in the event, neither did anybody else. And it’s not merely that they didn’t believe it; they didn’t understand it either.

Precisely what he said was this: “We need to make Brexit a catalyst for the bold choices that we’ll take advantage of the nimbleness and flexibilities that it makes possible.”

That’s since been checked by government officials and published as the official transcript of the occasion. What does it mean? Who of us can say? Certainly not Hunt, and he’s the one who said it.

It’s not merely that for most of last year the government actually had a brexit opportunities minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who makes no secret of the fact that the main, if not only, opportunity he has found is the as yet still theoretical opportunity to buy South Korean vacuum cleaners.

Last week, the front page of The Sun breathlessly announced the discovery of another: that sparkling wine could be 10p to 50p cheaper per bottle after we scrap the pettifogging EU regulation that insists such bottles must have their corks covered by foil wraps in the style invented by Madame Cliquot 200 years ago.

I happen to have a nice Veuve Cliquot on the wine rack at home, next to three cheap Italian proseccos from Tesco that – guess what – have no foil wraps on them at all. So somebody, somewhere, is pocketing anywhere between 30p and £1.50 that they really shouldn’t be.

“Confidence in the future starts with honesty about the present,” said Hunt. He’s absolutely right about that, of course, and it is one of the pithier explanations for why it really doesn’t get any less traumatising to have to listen to politicians who campaigned against Brexit, voted against it, foretold precisely what its consequences would be and have been proved entirely right, now stand there and expect to be taken seriously when they say, “Erm, no, actually – and this will shock you: Brexit’s actually the answer to all our prayers.”

Mainly, though, the chancellor wanted to talk about his “four Es” (though listening to him it’s hard to believe that’s all he’d taken).

Apparently there are four pillars of growth and prosperity, and they all begin with E. They are – wait for it – “Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere”.

For a more articulate – and frankly easier to listen to – appraisal of the nation’s problems, you could do worse than revisit Boris Johnson’s Rhapsodies on a Theme of Peppa Pig World.

So what do the four Es mean, exactly? Well, get ready now – business is good; so is learning; so is having a job; and it’s especially good if all those things happen in as many different places as possible.

And that really was it. Actual people had to stare at their own faces from a decade before just to listen to this.

On the subject of enterprise specifically, there he stood, explaining how the way to grow the economy is to cut taxes. Who knows, perhaps he was looking back at the young faces hanging around the necks of the old ones in the crowd, and thinking that maybe nobody was aware that not even three months ago, the last chancellor and the last prime minister had done exactly that, banjaxing the entire economy in an instant (and that he himself had been rushed in to clear up the damage).

On education, he had absolutely nothing to say beyond praising the work of “successive Conservative ministers”. He didn’t have time to name them all, not least as there have been five of them in the last 12 months, one of whom lasted just one day.

Employment – the third E – is another success story, apparently. Hunt, like the rest of the government, rarely misses an opportunity to boast about the “lowest unemployment rate for 50 years”.

Which is technically true, but it doesn’t quite explain why it is that, if everyone’s got a job, there are still 2.5 million people using food banks – including NHS nurses, who are currently on strike for the first time in their history over shockingly low pay. It also doesn’t explain why the most the government appears to have done about it is to have established a strict rota system of the very dimmest MPs to take it in turns to tell these people that the problem is simply that they don’t know “how to budget properly”.

But the chancellor didn’t really want to talk about that. Mainly he wanted to mention obliquely some “reforms” he may or may not have in mind to coax people who don’t feel like they can work – such as people with mental illness or a long-term disability – back into the job market.

One of these long-term conditions, by the way – these job-crushing disabilities – is what’s known as “having children in a country with the most unaffordable childcare in the developed world”.

We will, naturally, wait with breathless anticipation for whatever the reforms might be. But given that Hunt is currently doing his absolute utmost to avoid the reform that is most crucially needed – namely much, much higher pay – it may prove wise not to get too excited.

The fourth E is “everywhere”, which at least means that when, over the coming years, people like me have to write about how levelling up hasn’t happened, the government has provided us with two separate meaningless terms to use for it (just to keep things fresh).

“Everywhere”, he said, is about making sure that everyone everywhere gets a fair chance. And he actually – and fair play to him, really – kept the bit about how his government has “protected key projects like HS2” – HS2 being a project that his government hasn’t protected, but rather cancelled entire swathes of, and (at time of typing) isn’t entirely denying reports that it’s not even going to terminate in central London any more (and if it does, it may be subject to a 10-year delay).

So yes, chancellor: confidence in the future does indeed start with honesty about the present. But it certainly didn’t start today. And until it does, we can say with absolute confidence that the future isn’t going to have you in it.