Autumn Statement sketch: Sub-arctic Chancellor warms up the Commons

From our sub-arctic chancellor this was a rip-roaring performance. Using all the arts perfected by Gordon Brown, he dazzled the house with his Autumn Statement. A chancellor should never be entirely candid. His job is to blame others for failure, to take credit for all successes, (no matter what their true origin), to engender confidence in the future and to attract cautious applause. George Osborne did all this.

The bad news came out first. There were sharp intakes of breath as he revealed that the economy had shrunk by 6.9 per cent during the credit crunch. And he offered a personal confession which, in accordance with tradition, was masked in flowery statistical language. At the start of his chancellorship, he admitted, he had hazarded some absurd forecasts about our economic prospects. He explained this rather large cock-up as follows:

‘Weaker than expected growth can be accounted for by over-optimism regarding net trade.