He promised fresh hope and delivered doom, but Dr Death’s budget succeeds in doing no harm | John Crace

It was as if John Healey was taking the Hippocratic oath. First do no harm. For your first budget, this may be no bad thing: we can all think of plenty of chancellors who have done untold damage. Take a bow George Osborne. It might just have been better if the doctor that Healey had chosen to impersonate was not Dr Death.

John can’t help looking like the last man you would want to stop by your hospital bed. Not everyone can have a naturally sunny disposition. His face seems to be carved out of despair. But it would be a big help if, when called upon to make his most important speech of the year, he didn’t reinforce the impression when he opened his mouth. A one-way journey to the slough of despond.

“I’m very sorry to let you know, Mr Crace,” he would say with Voldemort delight. “But your cancer is now terminal. You have months to live.” And just when you are trying to process what he’s said and are preparing to say your goodbyes, he would let you know he had made a mistake. You only had weeks to live after all. He would then smile wanly, pat you on the shoulder before moving on to kill off his next patient. You wouldn’t be seeing him again.

Healey began with a few cheery words. Cheery by his standards, that is. This was a budget for working people. People often talked about global headwinds. John was here to let us know that these headwinds were more like a storm. Make that a hurricane. One we’d all be lucky to come out of alive. The wars in Iran and Ukraine, the rising cost of energy. The whole world was basically screwed. He knew the government had suggested we all stockpile food and water ahead of the apocalypse, but frankly we might as well not bother. Why prolong the agony?

“Fresh hope for Britain’s future,” he said. The word hope died on his lips. Only Healey can send you into a vortex of existential futility with an attempt at optimism. Even the normally upbeat Andy Burnham who was sitting next to him looked lost in his own sense of pointlessness. Not even a glimmer of a smile. The main reason he had appointed Healey was because he could be relied on to do his bidding. To deliver the kind of budget Andy had in mind. Ed Miliband was far too much his own man. But Burnham hadn’t factored in the aura of gloom.

The one consolation was that even John couldn’t be as depressing as Rachel Reeves. But Healey was working on it. Give him time. Most budget statements try to tell a story. To create a coherent narrative of the state of the economy, the government’s plans to stimulate growth and fix the problems they inherited. Even when the problems the chancellor is inheriting are the ones they created. But Healey was going to try a different approach. Just a series of unstructured, random spending announcements. Dr Death’s Seven Last Words on the Cross.

Most budget speeches also contain the odd joke. Or what passes for a gag in the minds of MPs. None of them are going to get gigs at the Edinburgh fringe. But on the few occasions that the mirror cracked and Healey’s mouth tried to form a rictus grin, his words fell flat. Turns out that not everyone finds telling people they have nothing to live for quite as funny as John. Worse still, he is a man with no sense of timing. He makes Ed Balls sound like a comedy giant.

There was the obligatory reference to Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and the hand that the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, played in it. That should have been fertile comic ground as it has the benefit of being true. Four years on, we are all still suffering PTSD. Everyone apart from the Trusster, who believes the real problem was that she was forced to reverse £70bn of unfunded tax cuts. But Healey couldn’t land the punchline. Labour backbenchers were willing him to succeed, but they still couldn’t bring themselves to laugh.

The only really funny moment was completely unintentional, when Healey said that the energy secretary had opposed Jackdaw. That was supposed to be kept an open secret, not broadcast to the world. The Tory benches couldn’t contain themselves with forced laughter. The chancellor tried to redeem the situation by ad-libbing that at least the opposition was still awake. Which was more than could be said for many Labour backbenchers.

Fresh hope and breathing space, Healey said again. It had become his only leitmotif. And, yet again, it felt like another nail in the coffin. The world was in turmoil, the country bouncing from crisis to crisis and the chancellor was doing not very much. Or rather he was doing a lot – he announced 98 different measures – but none of them amounted to a lot. Not that anyone was going to complain about getting £100 off their council tax or not having to queue up at the post office for your Amazon returns. These things do make a difference.

It was just that we were waiting for the big reveal. The major surprise. But time passed. And passed. And none came. There was a promise to spend 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, but no details of how. It was the miserabilist’s dream. Growth baked in at less than 2%, living standards predicted to fall.

A sense of drift. But maybe it was all deliberate. A country put on palliative care because it wouldn’t survive extreme surgery. Healey had said he had called an early budget because it was time to inject some urgency into the public finances. But many of the really big decisions had been kicked into the long grass. He had said the budget was to give the country some breathing space. It felt as if the government were the ones who needed the breathing space.

Kemi Badenoch’s response was similarly underwhelming. Then she had rather shot herself in the foot by admitting that the country had been paralysed and miserable under the Tories. She even found herself agreeing with some of Healey’s measures but her overall assessment – Was that it? – was echoed by many Labour MPs. Not that Kemi had any answers herself. None to be taken seriously, at least. At his own press conference, a disinhibited Nigel Farage had just sounded mad. There is no appetite for the Tories or Reform. So a breathing space it is.

• On Tuesday 1 December, join John Crace and Pippa Crerar as they skewer the biggest stories from Westminster and beyond, as part of the Guardian’s year in review event. Joined by fellow Guardian writers, expect candid conversations, witty remarks and surprises as they look back on the year-defining stories of 2026. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live