If Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was the final flourish before a May election, it’s going to be a very low-key campaign indeed. The Chancellor did announce his National Insurance cut as trailed overnight, and abolished the non-dom status – also trailed – which will raise £2.7 billion for tax cuts for working people. He increased the child benefit threashold to £60,000, and prolonged the cut in fuel duty. But he had no big surprise, and no aggressive political attack. I suspect that the excited chatter around Westminster about Rishi Sunak calling a spring poll may die down a little now.

Hunt’s own attacks on Labour were hardly aggressive

There was still plenty of talk in the chamber as Hunt gave his Budget statement, to the extent that the deputy speaker Eleanor Laing had to intervene repeatedly to tell Labour MPs – including shadow health secretary Wes Streeting – to stop shouting and talking over the Chancellor. Hunt’s own attacks on Labour were hardly aggressive. He is a mild-mannered man, but when he was health secretary, he was perfectly capable of a knockabout: he fought furiously with Andy Burnham over the NHS. Today, there was little fury.

He made a joke about Lord Mandelson’s instructions to Keir Starmer to shed a few pounds: ‘Ordinary families will shed more than a few pounds if that lot get in,’ he joked, adding like a typical runner: ‘If he wants to join me on my marathon training, he’s most welcome as well.’ He later suggested that Rachel Reeves might have theatrical ambitions, given how much she enjoyed pretending to be a Conservative.

The non-dom announcement means Labour will have to work out how else it can fund the NHS and schools, because Hunt is spending the money on tax cuts instead. But it is not a huge bind for the opposition that they’ll spend an entire election campaign struggling with. It’s almost as though Hunt and Sunak think that by the time polling day does come, the Budget will seem a long time ago.