Budgets are as much about the political theatre as they are about the pounds. Jeremy Hunt isn’t the greatest showman in Parliament, but he is trying, as he finalises the announcements in Wednesday’s fiscal event, to set the stage directions for an election campaign that could start within weeks of him sitting down. Currently, the show appears to be one of optical illusions which rely quite heavily on a willing suspension of disbelief from the audience: will voters really believe that the Chancellor has shrunk their tax burden by cutting national insurance?
A few months ago, Tory MPs would say they would be happy if the Chancellor set a “direction of travel” towards lowering the tax burden, and Hunt was still on that bend at the weekend in his pre-Budget interviews. He said he wanted to “show a path” to lower taxes, but that any cuts would have to be “prudent”. Now, though, there is a sneaking fear in Downing Street and among the wider party, that voters will once again refuse to give the Conservatives the credit for any kind of giveaway. They didn’t get a poll bounce after the Autumn Statement, where Hunt claimed he had delivered the “biggest tax cut on work since the 80s” by cutting national insurance. So why will anything be different now?
To compound the difficulty, Hunt and his colleagues oversold what kind of show this spring Budget was going to be. Tory party chair Rich Holden even claimed at one point that his party would be making two big tax cuts before the next election. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts put paid to all that, but Hunt would have known that he had left himself very little headroom for the spring anyway. It was almost as though senior Tories had been kidding themselves as well as everyone else that they’d be able to put on a brilliant show come March, much like the organisers of the Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow, who seem to have convinced themselves that a few brightly painted pipes and an AI poster of some sweets would be a “magical” show for children and their fleeced parents.
It would have been far more enjoyable for those families to buy a bag of flying saucers from their local sweet shop, and voters seem to be having a similar reaction to the Tory focus on tax cuts. Polls suggest that even the Conservative voters who are most likely to be annoyed by a record tax burden are in fact more concerned with whether public services are working properly.
I remember one Tory arguing to his ministerial colleagues back in 2017 that what the party’s voters really wanted was a sense of security that as they got older, they would get treated well and quickly by the NHS when they needed it, and that their pensions were safe. That feeling was worth paying taxes for, he would say. That man was Jeremy Hunt, then the health secretary making the case at Cabinet for proper long-term funding of the health service. He got what he was arguing for then, but is now subject to the kind of pester power from his colleagues that leads parents to part with large amounts of money for tickets to a Willy Wonka experience in an empty hall: tax cuts might not be the thing voters really want or need anyway.
This time next week, we will know very well whether the spring Budget experience has fallen flat or if the Tories have had a poll bounce. The following two weeks are the zone in which Rishi Sunak could call a May election: the last date he can dissolve Parliament by for a 2 May poll is 26 March, which would be just after the Lords and Commons have finished batting back and forth the controversial Rwanda Bill – and nicely before the policy has to stand on its own two feet.
If the Budget goes well, then it might be tempting to go to the country before the country has had a chance to see whether yet another policy – Stop the Boats – has been overpromised and underdelivered. There is certainly a muffled but steady drumbeat in Westminster which suggests a May poll is not off the cards.
When he gave his last Budget before the 2010 election, the late Alistair Darling was written up as being “nakedly political”, appearing in caricature form on one front page as Angela from American Beauty. He told me he saw budgets as the biggest political event of the parliamentary calendar, and that they “will set the tone of the whole campaign” in the forthcoming election. The tone of the Tory campaign will therefore presumably be “things we wanted to do but for reasons largely of our own creation, we couldn’t”.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator
A desperate Jeremy Hunt is asking voters to suspend disbelief
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04.03.2024
Budgets are as much about the political theatre as they are about the pounds. Jeremy Hunt isn’t the greatest showman in Parliament, but he is trying, as he finalises the announcements in Wednesday’s fiscal event, to set the stage directions for an election campaign that could start within weeks of him sitting down. Currently, the show appears to be one of optical illusions which rely quite heavily on a willing suspension of disbelief from the audience: will voters really believe that the Chancellor has shrunk their tax burden by cutting national insurance?
A few months ago, Tory MPs would say they would be happy if the Chancellor set a “direction of travel” towards lowering the tax burden, and Hunt was still on that bend at the weekend in his pre-Budget interviews. He said he wanted to “show a path” to lower taxes, but that any cuts would have to be “prudent”. Now, though, there is a sneaking fear in Downing Street and among the wider party, that voters will once again refuse to give the Conservatives the credit for any kind of giveaway. They didn’t get a poll bounce after the Autumn Statement, where........
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