Rishi ‘Hulk’ Sunak’s last hurrah: angry, energised and personally affronted

The outgoing Tory leader made a powerful case against the Budget, says John Rentoul, but he failed to answer Rachel Reeves’s challenge: what would he cut instead?

The Budget reply was Rishi Sunak’s last big gig in the House of Commons – despite Keir Starmer’s joke during Prime Minister’s Questions that the Conservatives change leader so often, “he may be back here” soon.

In those exchanges, Starmer and Sunak were all courtesy and best behaviour. Starmer paid tribute to his defeated opponent’s “decency”; Sunak was softly spoken and bipartisan.

As he listened to Rachel Reeves’s Budget, however, Sunak underwent a Hulk-like transformation. Reeves was tribal and aggressive, blaming 14 years of Tory failure for the tax rises she had been forced to announce.

When Sunak stood to respond, he was energised and seemed personally affronted. Labour had “broken promise after promise”, he said. The Budget was “proof that they planned to do this all along”, he raged.

He was, if anything, too animated, because his unique selling point is that he understands spreadsheets and will have noticed the damning details hidden in the Budget documents.

He did deliver a well-informed critique of the Budget, and he had spotted the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) prediction that growth was going to be lower than under the Tories. But most of his speech was a rehearsal of arguments that have already been made, at length, in the long run-up to the Budget. The Labour Party promised not to raise taxes or “fiddle the figures” to increase borrowing, but it “did not tell the truth”.

Instead of a calm and clinical dismantling of the Budget, however, he delivered the ranty diatribe of a man wronged. “I said it during the election campaign,” he said. “‘You name it, they will tax it’, and that is exactly what they have done.”

Victoria Atkins, the shadow health secretary, beside him on the opposition front bench, shouted: “He’s wiped the floor with Rachel.” But actually, he had not.

Rachel had seen Rishi coming. Her team were well aware of the convention that the leader of the opposition replies to Budget statements, and knew that this could be a dangerous moment because he knows how the Treasury works better than she does.

So she devoted a section towards the end of her 77-minute speech to “Operation Block Rishi”.

She said: “The choices I have made today are the right choices for our country. To restore stability to our public finances, to protect working people, to fix our NHS and to rebuild Britain. That doesn’t mean these choices are easy, but they are responsible.

“If the party opposite disagrees with the choices that I have made, then they must answer: what choices would they make?”

She used this as a chance to mention Labour’s magic words, “Liz Truss”, asking if the Tory party would “again choose the path of irresponsibility”. This may seem like Punch-and-Judy knockabout, but Reeves was making a serious point: “If they disagree with our plans to fund public services, then they would have to cut schools and hospitals.”

Needless to say, Sunak did not say what choices the Tories would make in the unlikely event that they were in government in the near future. His criticisms of Labour for putting up taxes ignored the state of the public finances that he bequeathed to Reeves at the election. He and Jeremy Hunt were already planning to raise taxes over the next five years when they presented the last Budget in March – and he and Hunt would have had to put taxes up even further, if, by some miracle, they had won the election. Or they would have had to cut public spending by more than the unrealistic amounts they put in the plans that they submitted to the OBR.

In my view, most voters knew that, whichever party won the election, difficult decisions would have to be taken on taxing, spending and borrowing. It may be that some voters will feel that Labour broke its promise not to raise taxes, but they also voted in the hope that Labour would improve public services. That was what they got the chance of in the Budget, and I doubt that the election loser protesting that he was right all along will persuade many.

Perhaps Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will have more luck by wiping the slate clean after the new leader takes over on Saturday.