If the autumn statement got a bad press does that mean it was good?

Is the quality of a Budget in inverse proportion to its initial reception by the media? Professor Philip Cowley, a political scientist at Queen Mary University, said today: “The usual rule with Budgets is that those immediately lauded by the media turn out to be disasters. On that basis, and having seen today’s headlines, yesterday was pure genius.”

He clarified that this was “sort of a joke, and sort of not”. But as he is one of the few academics to have a Law named after him, we should take him seriously. Admittedly, Cowley’s Law has nothing to do with Budgets. It holds: “There is an inverse relationship between the importance of any election campaign technique and the amount of media coverage devoted to it.”

I think it dates from the time when direct mail was the Big Thing in campaigning – individually addressed letters to target voters tailored by computer to their demographics or canvassing returns. Anyway, not such a Big Thing any more, thereby proving Cowley’s Law.

What we might call Cowley’s Second Law cites evidence such as Gordon Brown’s last Budget, in 2007, when he abolished the starting rate of income tax of 10p in the pound to help pay for a cut in the basic rate from 22p to 20p.

That was hailed as a brilliant stroke, stealing the Conservatives’ tax-cutting policy and preparing for an early election that autumn. The election never happened, and it took a long time for the overlooked negative effect on low-paid workers to become clear, which proved expensive and complex for Alistair Darling to fix the following year.

In which case Jeremy Hunt should be delighted with this morning’s headlines. “Tories soak the strivers,” said the Daily Mail. “Years of tax pain ahead,” said The Times. “The rhetoric of Osborne … with the policies of Brown,” said The Daily Telegraph, quoting Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation. We at The Independent had “A grim few years ahead”, quoting the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

So will people look back on this Budget – or, rather, fiscal event – in years to come as a turning point, when Rishi Sunak and his chancellor took the bold, unpopular but necessary measures needed to turn things round?

Should we compare it to Geoffrey Howe’s Budget in 1981, panned by the critics at the time, including by 364 economists who signed a letter to The Times, yet grudgingly conceded later to have been broadly right? (I accept that the 1981 Budget is still argued over, but in my view the tax rises were right and it was the high interest rates – in those days decided by the government – that were mistaken.)

I doubt it, but what is striking about the coverage of Hunt’s statement is the absence of any credible alternative policy that the government should be following. No one likes higher taxes, but the opposite policy has just been tried in a real-world experiment that blew up the chemistry lab.

What is surprising is the number of Conservative commentators who take the view that real Trussism hasn’t yet been tried, and that her mistake was to fail to cut public spending, without saying what public spending should be cut.

What is more revealing about the “day after” analysis of the autumn statement is that both the IFS and the Resolution Foundation, two of the best think tanks for understanding taxes and public spending, give Hunt some credit for having managed a tight political corner about as well as he could have.

The “day two” analysis is that the problems of the UK economy are worse than we thought, but by raising taxes, while putting off hard decisions on cutting public spending, Hunt has done enough to satisfy the markets and stabilise the public finances while minimising the pain.

What is striking is that the hidden surprises of this Budget were not in the measures themselves, but in the picture painted by the forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) of the underlying weakness of the economy and therefore of the need for tax rises in the first place.

The biggest thing, which we knew in theory but had not processed in practice, is that the national debt is so large that the interest payments on it will eat up 4 per cent of national income. We have moved quite suddenly from a long period when public borrowing was essentially free to one where it isn’t.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

This has happened after debt rose as the result of three big shocks, from the financial crisis, coronavirus and the rise in oil and gas prices.

Then there is another problem that has been exposed by the OBR forecast. As Paul Johnson, the mild-mannered director of the IFS, says: “What on earth is happening to incapacity and disability benefits? Since March the OBR has revised upwards its estimates of spending on these benefits by staggering £7.5bn a year, and estimates of the number of recipients by more than a million.”

When historians look back at the 2022 autumn statement, they are likely to see it as a necessary first step in coming to terms with some rather bigger problems than a nation facing a temporary, if sharp, dip in living standards. But I doubt if it will be hailed as a work of genius.