Picture the scene. A teenage Jeremy Hunt stands in his family living room, which looks like it’s been the target of a drone strike.
Windows are broken, there are empty bottles and cans everywhere, cigarettes stubbed out on the carpet and the coffee table now features a scratch that even the finest french polishers in the Yellow Pages would struggle to repair.
“Mother, I’ll be honest with you, there was a party here last night,” Young Jeremy says, an enormous red wine stain on his shirt.
“And when I find the people that did it, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. Now, can I borrow the car?”
It’s normally pretty easy to get Tory MPs excited about a wicked rhetorical wheeze that gets them off the hook for years of economic mismanagement.
But the longer Jeremy Hunt spent blaming global factors, Vladimir Putin, Covid, a naughty dog, mischievous spirits and the Wifi going down for the state we find the economy in - rather than, say, 12 years of Conservative policies culminating in the bonkers banter climax of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng - the deeper Tory MPs could only stare into the abyss.
Any lingering hope for a rabbit in the Chancellor’s hat gradually drained away - as did the colour from their faces.
You could see in real time the wave of realisation that all Hunt had in his hat was ’it was nothing to do with us, guv.’
This wasn’t a budget speech to give them ammunition for the doorstep in answer to voters asking them why on earth they should be trusted to run the country after the last 12 years - and particularly the last eight weeks.
It was about leaving landmines for Labour if and when they win the next election - reserving the most painful squeezes for 2024, conveniently after the next election.
The rabbit has been shot, and it turns out it had myxomatosis all along.
Now, can he still borrow the car?
