Colleagues pray for Jezza to cut his losses when his four Es fail to kick in

theguardian.com:

Y ou need charisma to pull off a good con trick. To lull your audience into suspending disbelief. A sleight of hand that makes everyone look elsewhere while the economy stalls and the country suffers its worst fall in living standards since records began.

And Jeremy Hunt has no presence. More an absence. A vacuum where personality is normally found. So for an hour he died on his feet at the dispatch box. Luckily, he didn’t seem to know a thing about it.

Hunt’s wife and children were in the visitors’ gallery being minded by MP Lee Anderson for the chancellor’s first budget since his emergency financial statement last November. Let’s hope they aren’t scarred for life.

That previous emergency budget had been to unspook the markets after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s emergency budget a month or so previously. It’s getting hard to keep track. The Tories have been playing catchup for a while.

Hunt got to his feet just after prime minister’s questions. From the off, it seemed touch and go whether he was going to make it to the end. His voice felt thin. Frail, even.

Rishi Sunak and his colleagues on the frontbench grimaced. Willing him to make it through. To not fuck up and let them down. The backbenchers talked among themselves or closed their eyes and dozed. It’s possible they might have been thinking. Though that would be a first for some.

There were enormous challenges to the economy, Hunt began. Yes, and most of them had been self-inflicted by the Tory party. It wasn’t the rest of us who tanked the economy with unfunded tax cuts. Though we have been picking up the tab.

But Jezza didn’t want to talk about Kamikwasi. He wanted to talk about how we’ve never had it so good. How only a Tory government could clear up a Tory mess.