Hammond tries full-on Tigger but finds Eeyore a better fit | John Crace

His days of doom and gloom were over – but maybe things weren’t so grrrrreat after allAs an exercise in expectation management it could hardly have been improved upon. Philip Hammond had promised he wouldn’t have anything very interesting to say in his spring statement and he was as good as his word. But as the chancellor is a man of some vanity who finds it hard to resist any opportunity to be the centre of attention, the fact that he had nothing very much to say wasn’t