Star comment: George Osborne's poker hand takes the pot
Given the lousy cards that the Chancellor is currently holding, George Osborne probably played them as well as anybody could in an assured autumn statement which cheered his own side and wrongfooted Labour.
After the shambles of his Budget and his infamous pasty tax, U-turns, and embarrassment, this statement was something of a success for him.
It is still early days in the analysis and it will take time to digest the statement and discover any nasty little surprises and trickery which are buried among the small print. As always, the devil is in the detail.
But for the moment this is an outline of a financial strategy which ticks all the boxes that the Chancellor needed to tick.
The help for business on corporation tax is a crowd-pleaser among the business community and with Tory MPs. He has ticked the box with motorists by theatrically scrapping the planned rise in fuel duty.
His raising of the personal tax allowance will help keep his Lib Dem coalition partners onside as it goes some way towards Nick Clegg's aspiration of a £10,000 threshold. And most importantly, Mr Osborne is ticking the biggest box of all by continuing the attack on the deficit, despite having to alter the timescale.
Politically, for the Chancellor to have come to Parliament with the message that he has got his sums wrong and the pain will go on – although of course he did not put it like that – and to escape with his Labour opponents unable to lay a glove on him, counts as a triumph.
For ordinary people it is going to be tough, with those on benefits particularly hard hit.
This crisis blew up in 2008 and now the Chancellor says the austerity will continue until 2017 or 2018.
The grim reality is that we are in the middle of a lost decade.
