Philip Hammond's budget is a long way from tackling future challenges | Larry Elliot

Philip Hammond’s budget marks the end of the Brexit phoney war.The chancellor knows that the eerily calm conditions of late 2016 are quite likely to end, which was why the unspoken thrust of his package was to make the UK economy ready for life outside the European Union.Not that it was possible to detect any concern from Hammond’s speech, in which he managed to channel his inner Basil Fawlty by making only a glancing reference to the result of the referendum.