In the final few, frantic days before a “fiscal event”, as budgets and autumn statements are known at the Treasury, civil servants are usually locked in seclusion.
They may hand out the odd carefully crafted teaser to hungry hacks – a few quid for broadband here, a small business tax cut there – but the most eye-catching giveaways are reserved for the chancellor to announce himself, with a theatrical flourish, on his big day.
Yet on Tuesday lunchtime, a shopping list of tasty handouts for Britain’s Jams – the “just about managing“ households Theresa May has promised to help – dropped into journalists’ inboxes, to be splashed across the front pages at midnight.
None of the measures are very costly for a Treasury battling to balance the books, and several – a ban on letting fees; a 30p an hour increase in the national living wage – are free, to the taxpayer at least.
But any one of them would have made an upbeat news story for autumn statement day. It is hard to remember an occasion when more positive measures have been pre-announced before the chancellor has even opened the door of No 11 Downing Street to set off for the House of Commons.
So what is the new chancellor up to? One theory is that he has an even bigger political rabbit to pull out of his red box on Wednesday: a bumper cut in fuel duty; a faster-than-expected increase in the tax-free personal allowance; or a generous cut to air passenger duty, for example.
But Hammond’s team has been keen to stress that he is a no-nonsense chancellor who will make a slimmed-down, gimmick-free, matter-of-fact statement: more of an Alistair Darling, then, than a George Osborne. So that seems unlikely.
A second possibility is that Hammond knows he will have to spell out the economic risks of Brexit in his statement – with the independent Office for Budget Responsibility expected to say that growth and tax receipts both look markedly weaker, and more uncertain.
If the forecasts look particularly grim, and Hammond’s team believes the headlines everywhere will be “Brexit blows black hole in Hammond’s budget”, they may feel it’s worth getting the good news out of the way first. All the more so if he opts to pencil in more spending cuts at the end of the parliament to make good the shortfall.
And as the cabinet’s self-appointed captain of caution where Brexit is concerned, perhaps Hammond really does want the focus to be the state of the economy, through Brexit and beyond – a quaintly old-fashioned approach compared with that of his predecessors. The key measure in Osborne’s final budget was compulsory academisation for schools – a plan which the government later had to drop.
If Hammond objects to twiddles and gimmicks – and especially if some of these have been inserted into the autumn statement at the insistence of May and her team – perhaps he was keen to get them out of the way, and clear the decks for the serious stuff.
But the blizzard of pre-announced handouts, albeit modest ones, also raises a more intriguing thought: is there something else the chancellor will tell us in his first set-piece statement that the Treasury spin doctors believe will eclipse any reassurance Hammond has to offer the Jams? A clearer vision for how the government will approach Brexit, for example? We’ll soon find out.
