The Budget is far too little, too late to save the Conservative Party from defeat

Editorial: It is a deafening fact: sometimes the chancellor struggled to be heard in a raucous session in the Commons, but the voters have stopped listening to him and his party anyway

(Dave Brown)

Well within living memory, a pre-Budget leak would be a resignation matter for a chancellor of the Exchequer – and Treasury ministers were placed in a state of strict pre-Budget “purdah”, during which media appearances were strictly forbidden. Times change, and now they’ve altered to the extent that Jeremy Hunt’s latest package of measures has been so widely and comprehensively floated, briefed and analysed that when he got to his feet he had nothing to add of any substance.

The cuts in national insurance, adjustments to child benefit thresholds, the freeze in fuel duty, and the “full expensing” on leased assets were so well-trailed that the announcements, all significant, were met only with a collective national shrug. Another tradition was broken because the Commons chamber was continuously noisy, and the deputy speaker made only token attempts to impose the sepulchral silence in which Budgets used to be heard, aside from rare moments of gross disorder.

The overall effect was to make the Budget less of an event than the government surely wished for. Indeed the lack of a final rabbit out of the hat – which in reality the press were fully expecting – left Mr Hunt presiding over something of an anti-climax. Rather than the crack of a starting pistol on a frantic period of electioneering, it was a bit boring. It may therefore be just as well that the supposed “early” election (in reality very close to the end of the parliament in any case) seems to have been abandoned. It certainly did not feel like a Budget that might be the game-changer the Tories so desperately need. On balance, Mr Hunt would have been better off keeping schtum.