About halfway through his Budget speech, Jeremy Hunt was making a joke about returning from retirement on the backbenches in his fifties to a new career in finance. ‘How’s it going?’ heckled one opposition MP. The Commons erupted into laughter. ‘It’s going well, thank you!’ Hunt replied merrily.
The speech itself did go smoothly: Tory MPs were quite quiet for passages of it, while Hunt made few jokes. He themed it around four words beginning with ‘E’. It might have been irresistibly hilarious for most MPs to listen to a less straight-laced Chancellor than Hunt saying ‘moving on to my second E’. But the intentional boringness of this government meant most of the (hollow) laughter was directed at any statements Hunt made about how well his party had handled the economy over the past few years – and at Rishi Sunak’s private swimming pool.
Those four Es are ones the Chancellor has been talking about for a while – enterprise, education, employment and everywhere – and they included a number of big retail offers Hunt was clearly proud of.
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