A mini budget full of lies from Rishi Sunak, the people’s millionaire | John Crace

At least the speech was short and sweet, coming in at little more than 25 minutes. Rishi Sunak, well, he was not so sweet. The chancellor likes to portray himself as a man of the people. Someone who gets the everyday struggles. A man who feels our pain. A tough call for a millionaire married to a billionaire. Then, I guess he would argue that poverty is relative. And compared to his wife, he’s broke. Sunak also prides himself on being someone who levels with the country. A man who can be trusted to be straight, even when delivering bad news.

Neither version of himself survives the slightest contact with reality. Rather he is the worst of both worlds. A chancellor with a veneer of empathy. Who can deliver a spring statement – AKA a seismic budget in any other year – that offers nothing to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society while sobbing on their behalf. Who can tell the chamber with a straight face that he is committed to cutting taxes even when the Office of Budget Responsibility is saying that the tax burden is set to go up to 36.3% by 2026: the highest level since the 1940s.

Sunak began with the war in Ukraine. Something Boris Johnson found unaccountably funny. As the chancellor talked of men, women and children huddling in bombed-out basements, the prime minister laughed. Let’s be kind. He probably wasn’t paying attention and was in his own private world. He finds it difficult to concentrate at the best of times, and especially so when he’s not the centre of attention.

The longer he went on, the more it became clear that Ukraine was going to take a lot of the blame for the biggest fall in living standards since records began. No matter that prices were rising, inflation was at 6% and rising and interest payments on government debt were at record levels before Russia declared war – Sunak wasn’t going to let a good war go to waste. In his rewritten history, everything was near enough back to normal after the Covid pandemic before Ukraine came along.

But we were not to worry. The government was going to stand by the British people. Or rather stand quite near some of them. Don’t want to get too close to the little people. So here’s what was going to happen. First off Sunak was going to cut fuel duty by 5p a litre. Just for a year, mind. Though good luck to anyone who expects him to reinstate the duty in the year before an election.

And whether that many people will notice the fuel duty cut is anyone’s guess as the price of petrol has gone up by at least 5p in the past few weeks. So if you haven’t filled up for a fortnight, you probably wouldn’t appreciate the chancellor’s largesse. Even if it cost the exchequer billions.

Now it started to get really confusing. After promising a further £500m to help poorer households – “Is that it?” said a lone Labour voice – Sunak assured the house he could only be so generous because he had hitherto handled the economy so marvellously. Which made you wonder how bad things would have got if the chancellor had been a bit shit.

“The work starts now,” Sunak insisted. Though many of us could have sworn the Tories had been in power for 12 years. The work Sunak seemed to have in mind was undoing most of what he had done six months ago.

Then he had insisted that the 1.5% rise in national insurance contributions was vital to keep the NHS up and running. Now he wanted everyone to forget that the tax increases ever existed. They were so last year. Rather we should focus on the £3,000 rise in the threshold at which NI became liable. Suddenly the tax rise had become a tax cut. It was totally bonkers. Not so much the Iron Chancellor as the Wibbly-Wobbly Chancellor. An amnesiac who has no idea of what he’s doing one day to the next.

Sunak ended by saying he wasn’t the sort of chancellor to seek short-term gains and indulge in political opportunism – but then immediately declared he would be cutting the basic rate of income tax by 1p in time for the next general election. Weirdly, he didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.

This announcement didn’t get quite the collective orgasm from the Tory benches he had hoped for. Perhaps because even the dimmest Conservative MP had worked out the statement was much ado about bugger all and that people would be freezing cold and totally broke long before they could get excited about the 1p income tax cut. The performing seals did, though, dutifully wave copies of Rishi’s “cunning plan”. An eight-page vacuous document filled mainly with pictures of people filling up their cars with petrol. To remind everyone of when you could afford to.

It’s never the easiest job to follow a budget statement of which you have no advance sight and Rachel Reeves’ response fell rather flat. The shadow chancellor had spent much of Sunak’s speech hastily crossing out and rewriting parts of her prepared speech. Though God knows why, as there had been no surprises in it. Almost all of it had been leaked well in advance.

Reeves would have been better off cutting out the gags. A protracted metaphor of Alice in Sunakland and the description of Rishi as “Ted Heath with an Instagram account” fell totally flat. She had a good story to tell about missed opportunities to help people with the cost of living crisis and there was no need for comedy. Normally she comes across as an engaging performer. Now she just sounded awkward.

The prime minister’s questions that had preceded the spring statement had been a dismal affair. Largely because both the Suspect and Keir Starmer realised that no one was really paying attention. Their exchanges lacked any real spark and the highlight was Starmer calling Johnson’s efforts half-arsed. Quarter-arsed, more like it.

We were treated to the rare sight of Natalie Elphicke, one of the dimmest of all MPs. A very low bar. She seemed totally bewildered by what was going on with P&O. Someone should gently let her know that if she hadn’t twice failed to vote for changes to the fire and rehire laws then she wouldn’t have the undying contempt of the maritime workers in her Dover constituency.