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My priority as Chancellor is to ensure that Britain remains the number one destination for business – creating the investment, the jobs and the prosperity to protect our long-term future.

And so the government will review public spending priorities and other commitments for the next Parliament in light of the evolving fiscal position at the next Spending Review.

I suspect that I will prove no more adept at pulling rabbits from hats than my successor as Foreign Secretary has been at retrieving balls from the back of scrums.

The government has cut borrowing by nearly two-thirds since 2010, but will no longer aim for a budget surplus (where more tax is raised than is spent) by 2019.

In the meantime, the government will take action now to reduce the difference between the treatment of cash earnings and benefits.