This is the largest Budget giveaway in almost 30 years – but it still won’t reverse the devastation of austerity

When Sajid Javid was chancellor, some allies of Boris Johnson liked to needle him by hinting to Westminster journalists that his deputy, Rishi Sunak, would succeed him at the Treasury. Even they didn’t expect that to happen so quickly, but Sunak got his chance when Javid resigned last month rather than sack his political advisers, and work to a joint No 10-11 Downing Street economic unit.

Sunak was in no position to resist, so today’s Budget bears Johnson’s stamp as well as the new chancellor’s after less than a month in the post. “I’m all in favour of jobs miracles,” Sunak joked in an assured debut on the big stage. This was no time for a novice but, to his credit, he did not look like one.

The curse hanging over this Budget has finally been lifted. Javid never got to deliver one at all, his November package derailed by the election. He has let it be known that he intended to announce a dramatic 2p rise in income tax, though Treasury insiders reacted with scorn, insisting he never balanced the books for it.

Sunak intended to produce a “levelling up” Budget designed to appeal to the Tories’ new working-class voters in the north and midlands. But his already hastily drafted plans had to be rewritten again to take account of the coronavirus outbreak. The £30bn of measures he dedicated to tackling it has passed the test and lived up to his pledge to do whatever it takes to help people, business and public services.

It was a “spend, spend, spend” budget that Gordon Brown would have been proud of, a sea change for the Conservatives after their decade of austerity (which this government somehow implies was administered by another party in another age). The Tories have stolen so many of Labour’s clothes that the latter party is now totally naked.

Sunak could trumpet the biggest boost to infrastructure spending since the 1950s, and the largest Budget giveaway since 1992. It was what we have come to expect in a pre-election Budget; lots of goodies, but putting off the bad news to another day. Normally, the first post-election Budget is a time to get the bad stuff out of the way long before the next election. Not this time.

The package appeared too good to be true. Sunak could not only boost the budgets for infrastructure and day-to-day spending on public services; he also managed crowd-pleasing measures such as freezing the duties on fuel and alcohol.

The political message was that the government is delivering on its manifesto promises. Johnson knows he will lose voters’ trust at his peril. I counted Sunak using a phrase with “get” and “done” in it no fewer than 22 times, surely Dominic Cummings’s successor to his “get Brexit done” election slogan.

The Budget will buy the Tories some time with their new supporters. But the splurge of capital projects will not be noticed by them overnight; it can take two years to get shovels in the ground. The pressures on public services will not disappear, despite the extra money injected. The Tories are not reversing the impact of their “lost decade”.

The government is also finding that you can’t just wave a wand to magic up 50,000 nurses or 20,000 police officers (the exact number the Tories have cut since 2010). I’m told Priti Patel’s impatience with her civil servants was caused partly by their warnings it could take two years to recruit and train 20,000 officers, and to allow for normal turnover, the Home Office would need twice that number.

Crucially, Sunak put off a decision on whether to keep the Tory manifesto’s fiscal rules until his second Budget in the autumn. Johnson will want them to be eased; for now, Sunak has committed only to review them. He claimed the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the independent watchdog, found £12bn of headroom within the existing rules, which promised to balance day-to-day spending (without borrowing) by 2022-23. But that is misleading since the OBR’s calculations, including its optimistic forecast the economy will grow by 1.1 per cent this year and 1.8 per cent in 2021, do not factor in coronavirus.

The elephant in the Commons chamber today was tax rises. Even allowing for higher borrowing at record low interest rates, the Tories will not want public spending to grow at twice the rate of the economy for long. So some tax increases are inevitable. I suspect we will hear more about them in the autumn Budget, probably the time for the unpalatable medicine that normally follows an election.