Big, bold, brash – and busted?

Most chancellors have plenty of time to prepare their Budgets generally accompanied by frenzied activity in the halls of Horse Guards Road and 100 Parliament Street. However for this chancellor and indeed his predecessor this has not been the case. Less than a month ago I described the previous chancellor’s ‘mini-Budget’ as ‘big bold and brash’ (Tax Journal 29 September 2022). But today there’s perhaps another ‘b’ to add: ‘busted’?

Before even a full working day in role Jeremy Hunt has delivered a second ‘non-Budget’ event within a month of his predecessor’s reversing much of the previous such event but going further. So what did we see?

What happened?

It was perhaps instructive that we actually saw two events on Monday 17 October: an initial statement to steady the markets followed...