Jeremy Hunt has been accused of “hammering the campaigners” and giving an “indefensible bounty” to wealthy landlords as Tory-backing newspapers and commentators piled pressure on him for Thursday’s autumn statement.
Acknowledging the uproar on Friday’s front pages, the chancellor said he could not be accused of ducking “difficult decisions” given the headlines.
They made for difficult reading. “Tax hell,” was the Sun’s brief summary. Perhaps most damning was the Daily Mail, which headlined “Tories soak the strivers”.
Domestically, the assessment of around £55 billion worth of spending cuts and tax rises made even tougher reading for Hunt. The Sun editorial said the autumn statement was “some of the dirtiest medicine ever given by a Tory chancellor”, adding: “We just pray it doesn’t kill the patient”.
Noting that the UK was braced for the highest tax burden in its history, the Sun said it feared Hunt’s announcement “could crush growth and give away investment, jobs and skilled players to competitors with lower taxes.”
While by no means suggesting the mess was caused solely by the Tories, the paper’s editorial asked why Britain was “unique in hitting household purchasing power in the teeth of a recession”.
He was still scornful of workers but said raising pensions by at least 11%, in line with inflation, was good news for those surviving on paychecks alone, but an “indefensible boon for millionaires without mortgages when life of young tenants is noticeably worse.” .
Deeper inside, The Sun’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh was much more effusive about the response from shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. “If Jeremy Hunt’s budget blizzard of tax rises, spending chaos and cans was designed to confuse the enemy, it failed,” he wrote. “Labor’s Rachel Reeves rises to the challenge”.
The Express showed some positivity and declared victory for its campaign to ensure pensioners who cannot work to top up their incomes get a pay rise in line with inflation.
But the Daily Mail, closely watched for its reaction by many Tory strategists, was much more scathing, calling Hunt’s statement a “budget to break the back of middle Britain”.
He said Hunt had challenged the Tories’ “fundamental principles” and showed a “grotesque overreaction” to inflation and the economic downturn. “The biggest losers will be the struggling families of middle Britain,” the Mail editorial said. “They are traditionally core Conservative voters. After this, many will inevitably question whether it makes sense to vote for the party at the next election.”
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Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator magazine, echoed concerns about what Hunt’s statement would do to the Conservatives’ chances in 2024. “No one can accuse him of offering false hope today,” Nelson wrote . “The harder question is whether there is any kind of hope.”
He added: “Not just an autumn statement was written, but the next Tory manifesto too, with all the bad stuff saved for after the vote. Hardly the behavior of a party hoping to win.”
On the front page of the Telegraph, a headline to make Tory aides shudder quoted the head of the Resolution Foundation as proclaiming that the statement amounted to “the rhetoric of [George] Osborne… with the policies of [Gordon] brown”.
Meanwhile, Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the website ConservativeHome, tweeted: “I will definitely not be voting Conservative at the next election.”
The headlines in traditionally pro-conservative newspapers are a cry from those after Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget. Then the Mail proclaimed: “Finally! A true Tory budget,” while the Telegraph published “Kwarteng bids for biggest tax cuts in half a century” and the Express praised the event with “Go for growth! Big tax cuts to herald a new era”.