Rishi Sunak’s Job Support Scheme arrived too late – Superman is human, after all

Sunak’s latest package could have been marketed by lastminute.com – and with unpopular decisions still to come, he knows he might not remain the man destined to succeed Johnson, writes Andrew Grice

The chancellor has been accused of playing catch-up (Reuters)

For decades, Treasury economic forecasts were universally regarded as an expensive joke. They allowed successive chancellors to produce the figures to fit their budgets, rather than the other way round. You can guess on which side of the line they strayed.

When George Osborne set up the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in 2010, he noted that Treasury predictions for the budget deficit three years ahead were out by an average of £40bn, with growth out by an average of £13bn.

Coronavirus has made such forecasting impossible. If Rishi Sunak had waited for the next OBR prediction, the economy might have disappeared in the meantime. So political judgements are back. Until this week, the chancellor’s economic and political touch was seen by Conservative MPs as the government’s one star in a gloomy year.