The Autumn Statement marks the latest in Rishi Sunak’s series of (often contradictory) relaunches

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.’ Kate explains why the Chancellor has changed his tune here, but he is clearly preparing Conservative MPs for a fiscal event that they might possibly like.

The Autumn Statement marks the latest in Rishi Sunak’s series of (often contradictory) relaunches to try to move the dial with the voting public and his own party, with all previous attempts failing to have the impact the Prime Minister had hoped for. In the past few weeks, he has variously rejected the politics of the past 30 years while also bringing back a former prime minister to be his foreign secretary, and lectured others on not taking difficult decisions while shying away from any of those in the latest King’s speech.

Tory MPs have been pressing for tax cuts for long enough to make any response that doesn’t welcome announcements this week seem rather churlish – though that is probably a good word to sum up the mood in the party. But they have also been pressing for a sense of vision from the Prime Minister: something he promised them in his address to the 1922 Committee meeting just before the summer recess. So far, they’re a bit confused about what that vision is. The Autumn Statement and Sunak’s plans to respond to the Supreme Court ruling on Rwanda give him another opportunity to articulate that vision, but it’s not clear how many of his own cabinet colleagues will help with that, given the visible splits over Rwanda. Even if there were cabinet unity, though, Sunak might struggle to communicate his vision if, as some of his colleagues suspect, he’s not fully sure of it himself.