The nation was on tenterhooks as the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, rose to make his post-Covid mini-Budget statement, yesterday. Nor did the Chancellor disappoint, in what proved to be a bold and imaginative plan to rescue Britain’s economy from its post-Covid blues.

As a “retail offer”, the headline-grabbing Stamp Duty holiday till March next year on properties up to £500,000 should do wonders to stir the sluggish housing market from its slumbers. Perhaps the biggest winners in the Chancellor’s bonanza give-away were the hard-pressed hospitality and tourism sectors, which employ two million Britons. The time-limited reduction in VAT to five per cent for tourism and hospitality businesses and the ingeniously named Eat Out to Help Out scheme are certain to give a fillip to these businesses as the summer holidays beckon, by simultaneously encouraging diners to return to their favourite trattorias and reducing domestic holidaymakers’ bills. Whether Sunak has saved restauranteurs’ bacon remains to be seen: he has at least bought them time and eased their cash flow problems. Some cynics have, however, already queried whether they will pass on in full the VAT savings to diners or will trouser the savings themselves. Time will tell.

Taken together with the Treasury’s original £158 billion Covid-19 response, yesterday’s further “plan for jobs” stimulus of £30 billion amounts to an eye-watering 9.4 per cent of GDP – managing to make Gordon Brown’s response to the 2009 financial markets meltdown, at 2.9 per cent of GDP, look modest.  Among other valuable and eye-catching measures were the launch of a £2 billion Kickstart Scheme to help 16 to 24 year olds get work experience, and a slew of new schemes to help trainees and apprentices. No one could possibly suggest the Chancellor was overlooking the needs of new and future voters.

As with any plan, there are, inevitably, winners and losers. This time round, the struggling automotive and aviation industries will have been left wondering whether they will have to wait to the autumn’s Budget to be heard. Similarly, Britain’s three million self-employed are likely to have felt left out in the cold.  

This was not a Budget for the faint hearted and old fashioned fiscal conservatives. Net debt (including the Bank of England’s funding scheme) is now in the region of £1.9 trillion and, even though debt servicing costs will fall this year, Panmure Gordon projects debt costs will reach seven per cent of government revenues as tax receipts retreat. But, then, as a former Conservative chancellor from the '90s wryly observed today, what else could the Government possibly do but deliver a massive stimulus package to help struggling Britons and meet the needs of these uniquely challenging economic times?

Whilst dinner is on the taxpayer, the nation’s waistline may expand a little in August, even as many personal finance pundits are encouraging us to tighten our belts. The two trends, working in contrary motion, just possibly may lead to indigestion later in the year. If there should be a second wave of the virus in the winter, what, we wonder, will our imaginative Chancellor have lined up for afters?