1. Duty calls
Rishi Sunak never intended Wednesday’s spring statement to be anything more than a cursory run-through of economic updates from the OBR and thus a signal that his days as an interventionist chancellor were over. Events, of course, have intervened – and this morning’s papers confirm that Sunak will too.
Treasury insiders call it a “limited package” of support for taxpayers at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis: a 5p cut in fuel duty, and a tweak to the threshold at which people start paying national insurance that would liberate 150,000 low earners from paying the tax altogether (just don’t ask him to reverse his rise for those who are still obliged to).
Both will go further than the chancellor would have ideally liked to this week – but spiralling inflation, runaway energy costs and anxious Conservative MPs give him little option. So much so that the real question for Sunak is whether he needs to go further still.
“Where we can make a difference, where I can make a difference, of course I will and that has been my track record and it will continue to be how I conduct myself in this job,” Sunak told Times Radio on his long tour of the studios yesterday. That was intended as confirmation that help was on the way, but it was also a reminder of the boundaries the chancellor is desperate to reimpose on his role.
Hence the emphasis on tax cuts – a backbench crowd-pleaser – rather than any other fiscal manoeuvre. That, at least, was the gloss Sunak is already trying to apply to a spring statement that, as his predecessor Sajid Javid acknowledged on Times Radio earlier, has fast become yet another crisis budget.
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2. Defenceless
Despite having conceded that he must do something this week, Sunak is still keen to show that he won’t do everything – and that means ignoring pressure from within and without cabinet for an increase to defence spending.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Liz Truss and others around the cabinet table have been pushing with varying degrees of tact and subtlety for a bigger defence budget. Senior Tory MPs make the same point to our Red Box reporter Mhari Aurora, who writes this morning of the clamour for greater fiscal firepower.
Yet Sunak told Times Radio that last year’s integrated review had already identified Russia as “the biggest state threat” to the UK, which led to “significantly increased defence spending”. But that, of course, was then.
3. Sorry not sorry
About the only explicit confirmation of anything the chancellor offered yesterday was his view on Boris Johnson’s controversial comparison of Britain’s vote for Brexit to Ukraine’s resistance against Russia in his speech to Conservative spring conference over the weekend. (Surprise! He didn’t like it.)
Forced to field questions on that predictably provocative and Twitter-friendly analogy on behalf of No 10 yesterday, Sunak was straightforwardly dismissive: the two events were “clearly not comparable”. Other cabinet ministers, such as his deputy Simon Clarke, chose instead to defend the PM. Another reminder, there, of the authority the chancellor is so keen to assert this week.
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That public disavowal – not the first criticism, however daintily veiled, of the PM’s rhetoric we’ve heard from the chancellor in recent months – probably explains why No 10 offered an apology of sorts in this morning’s Times. A source close to the PM says rather sheepishly: “It sounded better written down than it did when spoken.” Always the way with Johnson speeches.
4. Up and atom
All this talk of tax cuts might have distracted you – as it has the cabinet – from another set-piece announcement that will almost certainly have much more of an impact on how much we pay for energy.
Originally planned for a fortnight ago, the prime minister’s Energy Security Strategy won’t see the light until next week at the earliest (someone put 50p, or at this rate a tenner, in the meter). Today he meets bosses from the nuclear industry to discuss plans to increase Britain’s output.
Johnson dropped a heavy hint as to his own preferences in Blackpool on Saturday, telling Tory members that he wanted to place some “big bets” on nuclear energy. So why is it taking so long to say so formally? I’ll give you one guess. A No 10 source tells this morning’s Times: “Historically the Treasury is more reticent on nuclear because it’s more expensive.”
5. Friends reunited
A couple of months ago Red Box was first to reveal that the deputy chief medical officer and frustrated poet Jonathan Van Tam will quit Whitehall for a return to academia at the end of this month. But from the terraces of his beloved Boston United comes the heartening news that his friendship with Chris Whitty endures.
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The knights of the realm, caught on camera by BBC Radio Lincolnshire, make for an unlikely pair of non-league ultras. Unfortunately for Whitty, JVT’s Pilgrims lost 2-1. Probably time for an emergency presser on their fading National League North play-off hopes.
Patrick Maguire’s analysis first appeared in the Red Box morning newsletter