Somehow, giving his speech in the Commons just wasn’t the same as leaking it on social media
Not so much a chancellor, more a lifestyle coach. When Rishi Sunak gave his first budget just a year ago, he was the ingenue stand-in for Sajid Javid who had had a major strop. Now he is a brand – complete with his own range of merchandise. The ath-leisure hoody. The fragrance “Dishi par Rishi”. The conscious coupling to produce his own scented candle with Gwyneth’s Goop.
But what works well on social media doesn’t translate quite so well to the House of Commons. Because, having spent much of the previous week leaking his entire budget to the media and making six-minute Twitter videos, Sunak’s second budget – if you don’t count the eight emergency ones in between – felt rather flat. The best part of an hour in which the chancellor told us almost nothing we didn’t already know.
