Voices: Rishi Sunak is the ‘tax-cutting chancellor’ who hasn’t actually cut any taxes

For those of us not quite understanding why it is that Putin bombing Ukraine gets a British prime minister off the hook for almost certainly breaking the law and then lying about it in the House of Commons, there are some sudden signs of cautious optimism.

With far more egregious events occurring elsewhere, the question of Johnson’s own personal egregiousness had kind of gone away, but owing to frankly poor diary management from whoever’s in charge, the Conservatives have foolishly allowed for their own spring conference in Blackpool to go ahead. Which is now precisely one day in, and the tagline across the lectern really might as well be: “No We Really Are Like This. Had you Forgotten?”

Rishi Sunak kicked things off. “My priority is cutting taxes,” he said, just as he said at the budget in November, during which he announced the largest peacetime tax rises in decades, and which prompted The Daily Telegraph to describe the speech as “The Death of Conservatism”.

It’s never entirely easy to know what exactly is going on with Sunak, mainly because he is very significantly less bright than he thinks he is. There is, quite possibly, part of him that really does believe he actually is cutting taxes, even as he raises them to the highest level since the end of the Second World War.

And even as he ploughs on with a rise in national insurance contributions, which will cost normal families hundreds of pounds a year, in the face of an unprecedented energy crisis and the first major war in Europe in 80 years, he really does do so at the same time as talking about his mission: his grand belief in lowering taxes.

It is not easy to see quite how he’ll get away with it (other than, inevitably, cutting them again before the election.) You can usually get away, in politics, with saying one thing and doing precisely the other, but people do tend to notice when their monthly take home pay goes down, and it’s clearly because the chancellor who loves cutting taxes keeps raising them by mistake.

Oliver Dowden, the party chairman and chief culture warrior, has been welcoming literally dozens of delegates of Blackpool, telling them that what the British people want to see “is a bit more Conservative pragmatism and a bit less net zero dogma”.

And this, no doubt, is itself a bit of Conservative pragmatism from the chairman, in the sense that it was barely months ago that he was personally swanking about at Cop26, issuing grand public pronouncements about the number of tech companies he had convinced to sign up to net zero, which apparently no one cares about anymore so, don’t worry, neither does Oliver Dowden.

Matt Hancock, meanwhile, is still trying to make Matt Hancock happen, this time by positioning himself as the frontman for the Ukrainian refugee effort, making his ever more desperate bid to throw open his new home to as many refugees as possible as public as he possibly can.

Around 200,000 British people have signed up to welcome Ukrainian refugees. And what Matt Hancock has in common with absolutely all of them is that he isn’t in the government in any way. All that sets him apart from the other 200,000 selfless individuals is that he is the only one that has been busily pitching opinion pieces and doing TV interviews about his own selflessness, as Richard Madeley wasted absolutely no time at all in telling him.

If the war in Ukraine has got Johnson off the hook, you would think your average cabinet minister would have the sense to at least not publicly admit it. People are dying in their thousands, after all. But enter Jacob Rees-Mogg, for whom breaking the public safety rules you’ve made yourself and then lying about them, has now been exposed as the “fluff” that it always was.

Does it need to be pointed out that 150,000 people died, and that absolutely everybody led very miserable lives for a very long time, to try and keep that horrific figure down, and that that kind of thing isn’t really fluff?

Probably not. Nor is it worth dwelling yet again to one of the enduring storylines of the past six years, which is that all Rees-Mogg seems capable of doing in public is embarrassing himself.

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Meanwhile, Peter Cruddas – the former Tory party treasurer whose peerage last year was in no way linked to the vast amounts of his own private treasure the party continues to receive – has been on the radio. Boris Johnson, he says, “is the best thing to happen to this country in a generation”.

Look, it’s never easy to know precisely what’s meant by a generation, not least as Johnson has prematurely killed one off and personally sired another, and each of us are entitled to our opinions.

If he thinks that Johnson is better than the worst financial crisis since the great depression, better than Covid and better than the first major European land war since the 1940s then, well, maybe we’ll concede that it could at least go to a photo finish.