Jeremy Hunt has taken his scalpel to Liz Truss’s budget – now the real pain starts

theguardian.com:

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.

The new chancellor’s friends insist he isn’t after Truss’s job, even though he ran for it in the summer and is pretty much now doing it in all but name. Watching this statement, that seemed for a moment believable, for this was not the fiscal package of someone out to court popularity. By next April, middle-class traditional Tory voters will be facing soaring mortgages – spring will see peak numbers of borrowers coming off cheap fixed deals – just as their protection against soaring fuel bills ends, and they’re unlikely to reward the man who did it to them.