Jeremy Hunt did his best to deploy a reassuring bedside manner. But the Conservative party’s surgeon came bearing bad news. He had seen the X-rays, and it all had to come out. Not just the obviously gangrenous parts of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget, like her corporation rate tax cut or the abolition of the 45p tax rate, but pretty much everything still within reach of his scalpel. Goodbye indefinitely, proposed penny off basic income tax; farewell, IR35 reforms to benefit self-employed contractors. Even Truss’s energy bill bailout – the one thing that was still popular when everything else had turned sour – will be universal only until next spring, after which it will be capped and targeted towards the most vulnerable.
More painful for the country, however, may be the news that this emergency surgery is just the start. There would be hard decisions on tax and spending to come in his full statement on 31 October, Hunt warned. In March 2020, Rishi Sunak promised to do “whatever it takes” to get us through Covid, which meant spending billions. Now Hunt is promising grimly to do whatever is necessary to restore market confidence, which means very much the opposite.
