At last! Something to crow about – but our hand-wringing milksop Chancellor had the passion of a quivering vole: QUENTIN LETTS on Jeremy Hunt’s understated return to the House of Commons after Parliament’s summer recess
At last the Government had decent news on the money front. Imparting it to a bedraggled garrison fell to that hand-wringing milksop Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer. What a quivering vole.
After months of gloom it turns out the facts of our alleged economic ruin were incorrect. The economy, while not quite going gangbusters, has done far better than Whitehall experts claimed.
Here was a matter for the Treasury to crow about and for a Chancellor to proclaim with vim.
‘May I gently say,’ began Hunt, with a bashful wobble of the head, ‘that this country has actually grown faster than France or Germany since we left the single market?’
May I gently say! With the murmur of a monk asking the abbot to pass the salt, he added: ‘On growth, last week’s numbers show that we have recovered better from the pandemic than France, Italy or Germany and we are doing extremely well, despite all the pressures.’
At last the Government had decent news on the money front. Imparting it to a bedraggled garrison fell to that hand-wringing milksop Jeremy Hunt (pictured), Chancellor of the Exchequer, writes Quentin Letts
Donald Trump would have blared it forth as if introducing a topless darts player to a beered-up auditorium. Emmanuel Macron would have dressed it up with gold braid and the Marseillaise. Hunt gave it all the randy panache of a panda saying to a potential girlfriend: ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider dinner in the Qinlang bamboo groves one evening if I can get a table for two.’
Treasury questions in the Commons. Despite sitting on the front bench like a row of used flannels, ministers came under little attack. The Scots Nats moaned about Brexit but they always do. Hunt half-heartedly called our independence from the EU ‘a big opportunity for the economy’. Behind him Tory MPs leaned forwards, willing him on, almost screaming: ‘Well DO something about it you great ninny’.
A Labour frontbencher, Tulip Siddiq, made a detailed point about food import checks. Hunt again began his answer with ‘may I gently say?’ You’d find more naked aggression in a moth.
Perhaps it’s the English way. A friend of mine ran a B&B and used to bring his delicious cooked breakfasts to the table saying: ‘In France they say bon appetit, in Italy buon appetito, but here we say I hope it’s all right.’
At a select committee earlier, MPs interrogated the man responsible for the data glitch which allowed Britain’s enemies such as the New York Times to sneer that we were in economic nosedive
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Politics is a vulgar trade. Ministers need to stop being doormats. Like Ben Stokes’s England cricket team, they need to whack the ball, run some quick singles and generally rediscover the fun in life. The country doesn’t want to be as bunged-up and glum as Rachel Reeves. Let the pennants flutter.
At a select committee earlier, MPs interrogated the man responsible for the data glitch which allowed Britain’s enemies such as the New York Times to sneer that we were in economic nosedive. This person was the national statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, and it was put to him that the revision of growth numbers was a politically significant howler.
Sir Ian, 69, was a mildewed, discursive figure, capable of answers that lasted as long as a chapter of Leviticus. He peered at the public administration committee with a faint air of surprise through two rheumy eyes that crouched behind grease-smudged spectacles.
Add a scrofulous beard, Devon accent, bad teeth. The effect was more mad-professor than twangingly taut technocrat. He could have been Jeremy Corbyn’s long-lost West Country cousin. A rough Diamond?
I do not intend to be mean and am sure he is a sweet soul. At one point he started talking about flour prices and at another he treated us to a ramble about his family holiday near Corfe Castle. But he came across as the sort of chap whose supper always goes cold because he talks too much.
It turned out that his office looked harder at downsides of lockdown than some countries’ national statistics offices bothered to do. And he felt under pressure from parts of the civil service to rush out post-Covid growth data while it was still downbeat. Well, well, well.
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