‘Is that it?’ The echo of these three fateful words will haunt Rishi Sunak

Sunak wants to be prime minister. But the longer he spends in the limelight, the longer those words seem to hang around him

Why was the braying so loud? (PA)

No one is sure how long the family of hitherto unnoticed pterodactyls have been living in the rafters of the House of Commons, so no one can be exactly sure why they chose this particular moment to die a truly agonising death.

“MMWWWWWRRRRRAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH!” It sent shivers down the spine.

“BRRRRWWWAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” Another one gone.

The precise moment they chose was Rishi Sunak’s climactic moment of self-praise. “My tax plan delivers the [“BRMWRWAAAAAGGGGGHHH!”] biggest net cut to personal taxes in over a quarter of a century [“MRRWWAAAAAAAGGGGGH!”] and I commend it to the house!”

Well, that’s what I think he said, anyway. I have had to resort to lip reading from the video clip, the actual words being entirely inaudible beneath the horrific noise.

Why was the braying so loud? It’s distinctly possible Sunak’s Tory colleagues imagined that if they shouted loud enough they’d render this piece of utter garbage real. But it also can’t be ruled out that they could tell how absurd it was – and thought it might be for the best to smother it with such terrible noise that no one could possibly hear it and therefore it didn’t happen, even though it did.

Look, none of this is Rishi Sunak’s fault. He has been a tax-cutting Tory ever since he was head boy at Winchester College, so the mere fact that he has been chancellor of the exchequer for two years – and in that time has raised taxes more than any other chancellor since at least the Second World War – is not going to be enough to stop him from being a tax-cutting Tory now.

The main tax that he cut was to increase the base rate of national insurance from £9,000 to £12,000. This is a massive tax cut. It’s a tax cut so massive that it is almost as big as the increase to national insurance that he announced before Christmas, and which hasn’t actually come in yet, but will do next month. This is what tax-cutting Tories like Rishi Sunak now do. They announce massive tax rises, then they cut them – a bit – before they’ve even brought them in.

And what’s wrong with that? Who doesn’t want the country’s economy run like a moody Black Friday sale? What we’re gonna do, right, is we’re going to *say*that we’re going to put the price up by 60 per cent, but then just before we actually do it, we’ll only put it up by ten per cent and then wallop! FIFTY PER CENT OFF! This is the sort of thing that gets con men shut down by trading standards.

What were his other tax cuts? Well, he is apparently going to knock a penny off income tax in 2024, which if nothing else has at least announced the date of the next general election. Paul Johnson, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who for more than a decade now has politely and patiently dismantled every fiscal statement the Conservatives have made, appeared to find this one particularly easy.

“Oh for goodness sake!” was his response, to a proposed cut in income tax. His point, as has been made many many times, is that if you cut income tax but raise national insurance, then what you’re doing is raising taxes on people who earn their money through actual work, and cutting them for people who don’t earn their money but simply receive it, through pensions and rent.

And, naturally, Sunak the tax-cutting Tory introduces regressive tax cuts at the same time as being opposed to them. For the last six months, both Sunak and Johnson have found themselves unable to cut VAT on energy bills, one of Johnson’s key Brexit promises, made in black and white in The Sun newspaper.

Now, they claim it wouldn’t be fair to cut VAT on energy, because it would benefit better off people more than worse off; so they sadly have no choice but to do nothing instead.

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Yet, somehow, it is not regressive to cut VAT on the installation of heat pumps and solar panels, as Sunak announced, in his one entirely meaningless contribution to the soaring energy crisis.

Look, we can’t lower your bills. It wouldn’t be fair on poor people like you who can’t pay them. But don’t worry. All is not lost. If you can just get your hands on 40 grand or so to completely refit your entire house then I can save you a fortune.

It was at this point that a Labour backbencher shouted “Is that it?” Is that, in other words, all that’s being done about rampant energy costs that are terrifying everybody? It’s hardly surprising. Politics is like that. But Sunak may wish to note that these three words were shouted out in the House of Commons at almost the exact moment that the aggressively non-party political Martin Lewis asked the very same question on Twitter.

Is that it?

Sunak wants to be prime minister. But the longer he spends in the limelight, the longer those three words seem to hang around him. They’ve always been true. But they’re getting ever harder to ignore.