Tory MPs want a sense of vision from the PM

Jeremy Hunt has started the week of his Autumn Statement in a rather more upbeat mood than usual. He spent yesterday talking about the importance of bringing the tax burden down and getting the British economy ‘fizzing’: a significant change of language from his previous focus on the importance of getting inflation down. He told me on Times Radio that he saw a clear dividing line with Labour: ‘Conservatives do believe that if we’re going to be a dynamic, thriving, energetic, fizzing economy, we need to have a lower tax burden actually, than we’ve got now. And we believe that because if you look around the world, the fastest growing parts of the world are places like North America and Asia, where they do generally have lower tax burdens and Labour has a different approach.’

There was still caution, though: Hunt repeatedly insisted that while he wanted to ‘show people there’s a path to lower taxes’, it was going to take a while: ‘This is not going to happen overnight.’