The Government is in danger of misreading the national mood

Lots and lots of spending made him sound for all the world like a socialist chancellor – but he didn’t really want to do it, so that’s alright. In an ideal world, Rishi Sunak would be a proper Conservative. He would not want to live in a country in which everybody asks, “What is the Government going to do about this?” every time there is a problem.

But that ideal world is far, far away, Mr Sunak seemed to say yesterday. We have not yet emerged from the wreckage of the pandemic and the economic damage that it wrought. So for the moment, we have to be interventionist and extravagant in order to encourage the recovery that everybody wants. Even the private sector – with all its matchless ability to innovate and adapt – must be subsidised in this tremendous effort.

There was a transparent motive here: this was a vintage New Labour offering designed to leave the current Labour leadership speechless. There could be no credible improvement on the offer that was being made to the NHS, to the Red Wall constituencies (which were named as if to prove that the Government actually had heard of these places), and to public sector workers.

Somehow, all these projects for infrastructure and housing and R&D grants were going to generate a revival of actual economic activity – which was just about plausible.

But there is a more serious political manoeuvre here that may be more than just imitation of the phenomenally successful Blairite occupation of the centre ground. Downing Street clearly believes it is making an astute judgment of the national state of mind post-pandemic. I suspect that the Johnson Government genuinely believes that there has been a shift of mood in the country over the past year and a half of social derangement: something like the post-war spirit of communality and shared responsibility. (Continuing to help the working poor through in-work benefits which, as he said, encourage work, would seem an obviously right thing to do.)

Insofar as that is the case, voters are prepared to accept the Government as a proxy for the people as a whole – an agent of social conscience and collective humaneness. So they will welcome these moves – even if they are normally inclined to distrust massive government injections of cash – because they will see them as the right tone and spirit for the times: not unlike the historic creation of a welfare state and the NHS itself.

There is probably something in this – the country is emerging from a shared nightmare and is not much inclined to embrace ruthless individualism. But it will be hit very soon by devastating increases in the cost of living which will make every penny of tax that is paid, and every dollop of government money that is handed out, come in for very hard scrutiny. Some of the tax rises that will pay for all this government intervention are already on their way – the increase in National Insurance will hit particularly hard the same working people the Chancellor talks now of protecting.

What happens to the national mood then? Will the Government be able to adjust? It was odd – considering that the cost of living will soon loom very large – that the Chancellor scarcely mentioned climate change. In fact, he froze fuel duties and actually cut the cost of domestic flying. Maybe there is hope for real conservatism yet.