Is Rishi Sunak a fool or a fraud? To a great many people, it has to be one or the other after a mini-budget which seemed to be a smouldering mess of contradiction. He promises “to let people keep more of their own money” but puts up taxes higher than any modern Chancellor has ever dared. He invented furlough, then spent billions cushioning the blow of fuel bills. But his message to those on benefits who are now facing the choice of heating or eating? Sorry: there’s no more money left. It all looks rather odd.

Most of the Cabinet remain dismayed about the National Insurance rise which will soon take an extra 2.5 per cent off everyone’s salaries. Jacob Rees-Mogg has said it’s political suicide. Tories stood on a manifesto promise not to raise taxes, he argues, and voters remember such promises. Liz Truss hates it too. Even Boris Johnson was all up for dropping the tax and borrowing instead. But who was the biggest advocate for the tax rise going ahead? Sunak. The self-proclaimed tax-cutter.

Behind all of this apparent hypocrisy there is method, explanation – and a plan. It’s about history and strategy. Sunak started as a willing prisoner of No 10 but is now making a bid for independence.

He’s going through an economic version of the Shawshank Redemption: burrowing his way out of Boris’s big-state conservatism one tax-cutting spoonful at a time.

Sunak got the job when Sajid Javid walked out in protest at No 10’s control-freakery. Traditionally, the Chancellor – and the Treasury – have called all of the economic shots. But this no longer suited Johnson or, more accurately, Dominic Cummings. He wanted to merge No 10 with the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, creating a power triangle which he would run. To Javid, this was too much. When he was told his freedom was so constrained that he would not be able to choose his own advisers, he walked.

Javid had become known as Chancellor In Name Only (or “Chino”) and the joke was that Sunak, his 39-year-old underling, would be known as “Babychino”. To his credit Sunak didn’t even pretend to be in charge, instead casting himself as a William of Wykeham-style chancellor, picking up the tab for whatever folly the king wished to embark upon. “I should take his credit card away,” he once joked. He’d talk about funding “the Prime Minister’s agenda”. Like most of the Cabinet he regarded HS2 as a white elephant and net zero as an uncosted nightmare.

All served at the pleasure of King Boris because he was running a court rather than a government and could do so because he had personally saved the Tories from electoral annihilation. Without him, would the party have won all of those seats in the north? With personal victory came personal power. Crazy, expensive projects were pushed through on the nod. Some £300 million was spent buying OneWeb, a collapsed satellite communications project that caught Cummings’s eye. The state-directed science research budget was upped to £20 billion, another Cummings pet project.

Sunak argued, all along, that inflation might come along and make a debt crisis – but he was dismissed. The Tories had doubled the national debt to £2 trillion without any trouble and had been lured into a false sense of security. When Johnson wanted £12 billion-a-year to subsidise care home costs for wealthier pensioners, Sunak went along with it on one condition: that it would be financed by a National Insurance rise. He saw this as a small triumph: having No 10 accept that extra spending had to be paid for.

Two events since strengthened Sunak’s hand: partygate and inflation. The revelations about the lockdown festivities in No 10 deeply damaged Johnson’s popularity and, with it, his hold over the party. A good chunk of his MPs still want him gone, so he treads carefully: there are no more diktats from No 10. The sheer violence of the inflation – forcing debt interest payments up by almost £100 billion over the next few years – means cheap borrowing is no longer an option. Sunak is now free to impose his new rule: spending restraint before tax cuts.

Sunak is so keen to keep the National Insurance rise because he sees it, paradoxically, as a tool that will eventually lower taxes. He sees in the “health and social care levy” a new deal: that from now on, any NHS spending increase can only be funded by upping the levy. So from now on, any Tory who wants more health spending should also accept that it means tax rises. He sees this as repairing the basic sobering up of a Tory party that became punch-drunk on deficit finance. Yes, tax rises hurt. So maybe they should think about that when they demand more spending: on defence, welfare, anything.

He has accepted this will mean unpopularity: that the Dishy Rishy who was so generous furlough will now have to become the abominable no-man. Defence spending? No: it went up quite recently. More welfare spending? No: maybe those record 1.3 million vacancies can help. Public sector wages rising with inflation? No: it’s time to hold firm. Want to spend more? Then think of cuts first: perhaps some of those more fanciful infrastructure projects. Help with the cost of living? Yes: via income tax cuts. In 2024. If spending doesn’t go up.

This, perhaps, is the clincher. The 2024 ruse is intended as a Boris trap, to discourage the Prime Minister from his instinctive splurging. If more is spent, the tax cut vanishes. Sunak is trying to change the psychological wiring of his party and hopes to programme in a Pavlovian response: restraint on spending means tax cuts. If they want to spend more (especially the new MP) then they’ll have to eat up the tax rises.

This is why the Sunak budget looks so schizophrenic: it’s half Johnson and half Sunak. Half profligate, half parsimonious. Half hangover from days of the pre-partygate splurge, half panicked preparation for whatever inflation brings. It’s a collision of two competing principles of government – and, as such, a bit of a mess.

But it does also mark a turning point, where Sunak has been able to assert himself as Chancellor and the Prime Minister has been prepared to yield. If the Tories are to deliver the lower-tax country they promised, it’s hard to see any other way.