Dreaming Phil's tepid budget will be wrecked by a no deal Brexit, and he knows it

The Chancellor admitted we could be back here again in April, and we will be if the no deal maniacs get their way

Chancellor Philip Hammond has delivered his 2018 Autumn Budget (EPA)

Chancellor Philip Hammond played up his ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ nickname as he played to the gallery while delivering his Autumn Budget. It’s time to change that to Dreaming Phil.

Hammond’s dream is that his Government will somehow find a way of securing a Brexit deal that it can get through Parliament. If it can, his latest budget will count for something. If not we’ll be back here again in April, a possibility he alluded to in his speech.

According to the bookies he clobbered with an increase in the remote gaming levy, it’s still a toss up.

The Chancellor indulged in the usual waffle about building a new relationship with the EU we’ve come to expect from ministers. But he chucked a few extra hundred million on to rapidly growing contingency planning pile, acknowledging that the worst is becoming a distinct possibility.

And if that happens, “the strivers, the grafters and the carers” the “people who ask only of government that we protect the jobs that put food on their table” and look after the “public services that they rely on” are going to have some hard questions for him, such as “what did you do to prevent this other than issue warnings so you could say I told you so”.

Even if a deal is done, and his ”double deal dividend” budget stands, the forecasts are hardly rosy. Prime Minister Theresa May said austerity is over. The Chancellor’s formulation was a mite more cautious. It is, he said, “coming to an end”.

That’s understandable given the outlook he faces. This year the economy is set to grow by just 1.3 per cent, if the Office for Budgetary Responsibility has it right. Its assessment of UK plc’s potential further out has improved a bit but we’ll still be averaging growth of only 1.5 per cent.

In its view, Britain will be stuck in the slow lane for the foreseeable future, even with the benefit of the fiscal loosening the Chancellor is planning. All his talk of ambition and the bright future for the “indomitable” British people won’t change that.

In the meantime he confirmed that there will be some bones thrown and some sticking plasters applied. The NHS will get its extra money, but when set against what it needs it’s only the bare minimum. There’ll be a few less potholes in the roads, thanks to the £400m or so set aside to fix them, a bit extra support for those facing the nightmare of Universal Credit. That carbuncle, a project that is turning into the Poll Tax for this generation of Tories, is here to stay, he declared. That may come back to haunt him.

The Tories’ traditional supporters will cheer his bringing forward a tax cut, which is what the changes to the personal allowance and the top rate threshold planned for 2019 amount to.

And while Boris Johnson might have said ‘f- business’, the Chancellor wants to be its friend.

The Institute of Directors, for one, gave its thumbs up to business rate relief for small firms, cuts to their apprenticeship levy, investment incentives, more funding for City deals.

“But will there be support for SME Brexit planning,” it said archly, while criticising the Chancellor for “pulling his punches”.

There were some good bits; the commitment to end the private finance initiative in particular. The narrowly targeted digital services tax (aimed at Facebook, Google and their silicon valley pals) even looked bold, until the critics got their teeth into the details. The £400m it will supposedly raise is ho hum indeed.

In his opening Hammond talked about the concerns of the people away from the Westminster bubble, who care about putting food on the table, clothing their children, running their lives.

He boasted of the strongest wage growth in a decade, and the sustained real wage growth forecast for each of the next five years, that ought to make life better for them.

But at the end of the day those, and the rest of the forecasts, will have to be rapidly revisited if the “every possible outcome” the Government is planning for as regards Brexit turns into the the very real possibility of no deal. His tepid dream will turn into our nightmare if the crazies on the benches behind him have their way.

The most cogent response from the opposition benches to all this came from Labour MP David Lammy in a tweet (of course).

“If only there was one policy announcement at #Budget2018 that would give us the chance to keep our place in the world’s largest trading bloc, restore faith in the British economy, and send the pound into ascendancy. Oh wait. #PeoplesVote,” it said. Quite.