Philip Hammond is condemned to live in interesting times

He is proud to be a grey man of a Chancellor, and today Philip Hammond set out to be boring. So boring, in fact, that he announced he would be rationing his big set-piece turns on the national stage to one a year—this was to be the last Autumn Statement as such, there would be a single Budget in future. It was all a deliberate contrast with his too-clever-by-half predecessor, George Osborne, who liked nothing more that wowing the Commons with a counter-intuitive trick.

Try as he might, however, Hammond simply couldn’t be all that dull. The first reason is that he was obliged to present a few numbers which, by dint of sheer scale, commanded attention. Cumulative borrowing over this parliament was, the Resolution Foundation reports, pencilled in to be £93bn back in the spring, but that has now more than doubled to £207bn today.

This £115bn increase in borrowing is, of course, spurious in its precision. Economic forecasts are, quite rightly, held in the same disdain as opinion polls right now. They mostly involve tracing a straight line through a scatter-plot of the last few years of data, and then running the ruler forward to “project” what will occur. That’s all well and good when the future is just like the past, but much less useful when anything actually changes. And something pretty big has certainly changed since Osborne’s last budget, specifically the UK’s decision to sever itself from the continent. Nobody really has much idea how much damage this will eventually do.

It is, however, no longer a matter of pure speculation to suggest that there will be some material disruption. Even as Hammond—a Remainer—dutifully talked up the next chapter of our island story which the British people had just bravely penned for themselves, he had to concede to two immediate and adverse consequences that are already upon us—inflation from the sinking pound, and the uncertainty dogging would-be business investors who are nervously waiting to see where the country ends up. Wherever the numbers come out, the one racing certainty is that they will be lower than they would have been if not for this uncertainty. That means a smaller national income, on which less tax will be paid, putting a hole in the books.

The second reason Hammond fell short on his big ambitions for dullness is that the contrast with Osborne was just too stark. Under pressure from his next door neighbour in No 10, who has been desperate from the off to be considered a new government, he has been forced to try and make a positive virtue of dispatching with Osborne’s balanced budget rule, rather than quietly letting it drop. Theresa May believes that the forgotten half of the nation used the Brexit vote to make their forgotten voices heard, and thus insisted that today’s announcement included various modest measures—which ranged from hollow gimmicks to the unflashy but worthwhile—that do, or purport to do, something about the housing, transport and employment needs of communities who feel left behind.

And the consequence of these extra moves on public expenditure was that instead of taking tough decisions to get a grip on the new £100bn black hole that has just opened up in the public finances of a growing economy, the government was actually pro-actively choosing to make its overdraft bigger.

Hammond could try and be polite about Osborne, and he did, but when he uttered the five words “we have chosen to borrow,” he buried not merely some technocratic rule, but the whole way in which Osborne and David Cameron had—since 2008—framed the UK’s entire economic debate.

There will, as usual, be a few days now of picking over the various small bones thrown. The thinktanks will, quite rightly, explain that the latest tweak to Universal Credit gives back hard-pressed families only a fifth or a tenth of what they are losing from the Osborne cuts that were already in the works. They will explain, too, how—for the "Just About Sinking" who rely on frozen cash benefits—rising inflation will soon be biting hard. At the other end of the scale, the Sunday money supplements will explain to the anxiously affluent what restrictions on salary sacrifice schemes will mean to them.

Most of this, though, is yawn-worthy embellishment and detail. The big picture is set not by anything that the Chancellor decided, but by the context that the country finds itself in. It is a context which makes the public finances materially worse than they might have been just a few months ago, and the que sera-sera laissez-faire of the Cameron years politically unsustainable. Hammond may bitterly wish that it were otherwise. But he is a man condemned to live in interesting times.