Sunak showed his anger in his last stand as Tory leader

The Budget reply was Rishi Sunak's last big gig in the House of Commons despite Keir Starmer's joke during Prime Minister's Questions that the Conservatives change leader so often, "he may be back here" soon. In those exchanges, Starmer and Sunak were all courtesy and best behaviour. Starmer paid tribute to his defeated opponent’s “decency”; Sunak was softly spoken and bipartisan.

- JOHN RENTOUL

As he listened to Rachel Reeves’s Budget, however, Sunak underwent a Hulk-like transformation. Reeves was tribal and aggressive, blaming 14 years of Tory failure for the tax rises she had been forced to announce. When Sunak stood to respond, he was energised and seemed personally affronted. Labour had “broken promise after promise”, he said. The Budget was “proof that they planned to do this all along”, he raged.

He was, if anything, too animated, because his unique selling point is that he understands spreadsheets and will have noticed the damning details hidden in the Budget documents.

He did deliver a well-informed critique of the Budget, and he had spotted the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) prediction that growth was going to be lower than under the Tories. But most of his speech was a rehearsal of arguments that have already been made, at length, in the long run-up to the Budget. The Labour Party promised not to raise taxes or “fiddle the figures” to increase borrowing, but it “did not tell the truth”.