Hunt is on the morning round and the focus is on yesterday’s claim it is his “long term ambition” to end the “unfairness” of National Insurance and income double taxation. Welcome idea, but that’s a big promise…

On Times Radio this morning Hunt started rowing back: “That’s a huge job. It raises an enormous amount of money. And I don’t think it’s realistic to say that’s going to happen any time soon.” When asked by Kay Burley on Sky whether he wanted the tax abolished he said “we want to end that unfairness over time… but yes I think that it is wrong that we tax work twice while we tax other forms of income only once” before suggesting abolition is “not the only way that you can end that unfairness, you can merge income tax and national insurance.” Unusually messy for Hunt…

Labour is obviously jumping on this. On Rachel Reeves’ counter-round she is claiming an NI abolition is an unfunded tax cut of £46 billion, bigger “than what even Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng floated when they did their mini-budget a year and a half ago.” Kwasi and Liz will be having a chuckle this morning…