The harder Jeremy Hunt tried to be funny and normal, the weirder he became

If the chancellor hoped his Budget jokes and policies would go down a storm, he was sadly mistaken, writes Joe Murphy. The glassy-eyed expressions on his own benches screamed: Oh, God, we are so stuffed

At his final Budget before the general election, Jeremy Hunt announced a slew of barely-funded tax cuts (Getty)

Actors say the secret of playing a drunk on stage is to try really hard to look sober. Jeremy Hunt spent Budget day trying to appear funny and normal, and managed brilliantly to be the exact opposite.

Hunt’s campaign to look normal started after breakfast with a jog with his labrador, and posting a video of himself saying: “I hate watching myself on TV.” But then he just blurted out “Great budgets change history”, which is the kind of thing only weird people say.

Normal people don’t have this exaggerated sense of destiny. Only people descended from 17th-century colonial administrators assume that, like Luke Skywalker, they were born to change the future. (Hunt’s ancestor was Sir Streynsham Master, who ran Madras for the East India Company and imposed licences on taverns and theatres.)