Only three months ago Jeremy Hunt put himself forward to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister with a bold plan not just to freeze corporation taxes but to reduce them to the lowest level in the western world.
Then the former foreign secretary took over as Liz Truss’s chancellor — with the first item in his red box to put up those same taxes in an attempt to restore the government’s economic credibility, but his room for manoeuvre is more constrained than any chancellor since the 1970s.
He had two audiences to please with his first statement. The first and most important was the markets. The U-turn on corporation tax only saved the government £18 billion a year.
In order to bring down borrowing