Jeremy Hunt lost the room very quickly indeed and not long after that most of the audience lost the will to live. Budgets are never the most exciting of parliamentary events, but today took the tedium to previously unimaginable new levels. The whole thing was lifeless, insipid and dull. It had no narrative, no compelling vision, no new ideas – just a litany of largely technical tweaks, almost all of which never stood a chance of convincing those it was meant to persuade.
It was like watching someone’s death throes in real time, a party which seems to be visibly giving up the ghost before your very eyes. Jeremy Hunt has always been a terrible public speaker – aimless, monotonous, unconvincing, anaemic and repetitive. He lost the room very quickly indeed and not long after that most of the audience lost the will to live. In an attempt to liven things up, he inserted a series of jokes, which ranged from the cruel, to the condescending, to the inane. Many of them made no sense at all