Many years ago, a Chancellor of the Exchequer resigned because he had leaked details of his Budget to a newspaper. The episode was not wholly his fault ; the newspaper could have chosen not to publish. But he resigned as a matter of personal honour. (A parallel is Lord Carrington's resignation as Foreign Secretary over the Falklands War in 1982, even though it was the Ministry of Defence which was to blame for leaving the Falklands undefended). The politician in question was Hugh Dalton, who was the first Chancellor in Clement Attlee's government. (For full details, see Ben Pimlott's biography of Hugh Dalton). During my lifetime, the concept of pre-Budget 'purdah' has vanished, to be replaced by a fixation with leaking selective details, 'managing expectations' and 'setting the agenda.' Nowadays, controlled leaking details of a Budget is considered part of a Chancellor's job description. It would be thought completely ridiculous if anybody considered resigning over this.
The explanation for this change of (or decline in) behaviour lies partly in politicians' preoccupation with the '24-hour news cycle.' If there is not enough 'news', then the gaps must be filled by speculation. That is an important part of the explanation ; but it does not account entirely for Sunak's obsession with his self-presentation. The other part of the explanation lies in Naomi Klein's seminal work, 'No Logo', published over twenty years ago. For her, branding, or the association of capitalist organisations with certain sets of ideas or emotions, had become as important as selling the goods themselves. This reflected the increasing reality of capitalist economies (even more true now than it was then) of companies' outsourcing much of their work, and so becoming increasingly 'hollowed out' as organisations which directly employed people. Branding was, therefore, becoming ever more important in establishing that the organisation was still 'real.' Klein could discern that this principle was being applied to sporting personalities, such as Michael Jordan, but, as I recall, politicians did not come within her purview.
Sunak's fixation with personal presentation is a striking confirmation that Klein's thesis now applies to the political realm. (Others, such as Johnson and Trump, exhibit this trait, but their 'branding' is related to another phenomenon, that of politics as 'entertainment' and 'spectacle', whereas Sunak's purpose is different). Sunak has tried to persuade us that he wants to 'wrap the arms of the state' around us ; and he wants us to think that he is still spending lots, even though he has to be candid (or 'level with' us, to use contemporary parlance) about the need for future tax increases. Hence the Chancellor was 'controlling the agenda' by ensuring that news programmes were filled with speculation about a rise in corporation tax that may (or may not) happen in two years' time. The truth is that Sunak was forced by circumstances to adopt a policy of extreme Keynesianism last year, very much against his personal inclinations. He is now busy re-imposing austerity (local government, criminal justice, and many other areas of our national life will suffer), and increasing regressive taxation (e.g. the council tax). (For details, see the latest issue of the 'Socialist Economic Bulletin' and William Keegan's column in the 'Observer'). He does not want us to know all this, which is why, in the immediate aftermath of the Budget, the Conservative Party's lead over Labour increased to 13%. (Still less does he want us to think about Brexit, which, having been 'done', now does not officially exist as a problem). Politicians' awareness of personal presentation has been around since the dawn of mass democracy (one can think of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln, Gladstone and Lloyd George) but Sunak's personal 'branding' is something quite different.
Sunak wants to persuade us that he would like to invest more money, but can't, when the opposite is the case. In order to make the economy more productive, he needs to invest in the new environmental industries, but won't.
An even more egregious example is the aid budget. It is true that aid can be wasted, but that is often the result of conscious decisions by donor governments to use aid to buy political influence among those states which are the object of their largesse. Starving people in Yemen are obviously not a wasteful use of aid. The Chancellor, being an economist by training, should have read his Amartya Sen ('Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation' ; 'Development as freedom'), in which he demonstrates that, historically, famines have often been caused by lack of access to resources by the poorest, rather than by absolute shortage of food. It is well within the Chancellor's power to reverse this cut, but he refuses to do so, because the Conservative Party hates aid. (Cameron's and May's support for it was at odds with the instincts of their party). He would prefer to persuade us, through his glib fluency and attractive plausibility, that he is concerned, rather than doing the things that practically demonstrate care and responsibility for the world's most vulnerable.