Hunt blow as inflation jumps to 10.4% when experts said it would fall

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has staked the government’s reputation on inflation falling, pledging to cut it in half this year.

In last week’s Spring Budget, he boasted it would fall to just 2.9 percent at the end of 2023.

That felt optimistic at the time and it looks like mission impossible today, as official figures show consumer price inflation climbed in February from 10.1 percent to 10.4 percent.

Hunt has been grasping at straws and he’s not the only one. Market forecasters were confidently predicting that inflation would fall to 9.9 percent in February.

They weren’t even close.

In their defence, February’s figure is hardest to predict as it’s when the underlying “shopping basket” used to reflect changing consumer buying patterns are updated.

This year frozen berries were added, but I don’t think we can blame them.

Deeper, darker forces are at play, with long-term core inflation up 6.2 percent, when those highly paid analysts had predicted 5.7 percent.

Core inflation is also sticky in the US, which suggests it’s getting embedded in the system.

Worse, it’s the essentials that are rising fastest, with UK food prices up a terrifying 18.2 percent, the fastest growth since 1977, and gas and electricity bills soaring, too.