Corbyn is selling a fiction, but do-nothing ministers like Philip Hammond are incapable of fighting back

One of Philip Hammond’s first decisions as Chancellor was to move the Budget to the autumn, but this is proving trickier than he imagined. He was going for November but then worried that it might interfere with Brexit talks. So he went for October 31 – until his civil servants pointed out that this was Halloween and might invite unflattering headlines about “Hammond’s house of horrors”. He sulked for a while, then decided to outwit the tabloids by holding it two days earlier. So for the first time in a half a century, we’re due to have a Monday budget, on October 29.

But don’t cancel any plans. I’m told that it will be a non-event, devoid of bold ideas or any original thinking. Which is probably a mercy, given that Hammond’s ideas tend to involve surreptitious tax rises or expensive new spending projects. His relationship with Theresa May has not recovered from her ordering him to abandon his last wheeze – a National Insurance hike – and he hasn’t dared do anything since. The result: an immobile Chancellor in a stalled government, run by a paralysed Prime Minister at a time when the Labour Party is moving at speed.

It’s hard not to admire the way that Jeremy Corbyn is toying with the Tories. He comes up with an idea: nationalising the railways, and waits to see if there is a serious Conservative response. If not, he comes up with something else. A power grab over the press, for example, which would see a government minister dictate how newspapers are run. And if there’s no real pushback, he goes further. His latest plan is to part-nationalise every single large company in Britain, confiscating a tenth of their shares. It would be the biggest pension fund raid since the days of Robert Maxwell, all dressed up in the language of Thatcherite popular capitalism. He dares, he wins. Meanwhile, the Tories barely stir.

Mrs May was always going to be preoccupied by Brexit, but her Cabinet colleagues have no excuse. Take Corbyn’s latest plan: to strip 2,200 secondary schools of the independence granted under the Academy scheme, forcing them back under municipal control. So the reforms – that have seen former sink schools transformed and outperform private schools – would be destroyed in an assault on social mobility. And what was the response from the Tory education secretary? Indeed, can you even name the Tory education secretary? His name is Damian Hinds, and he isn’t saying very much.

Right now, Labour is leading the political conversation. Take Corbyn’s latest political film, Our Town, a moving portrait of urban decay. We see streets left to rot by Tory austerity, oppressed citizens waiting for a Labour renaissance. “These streets were once full of spirit and hope,” the narrator says over a picture of Mansfield. “We lost the jobs. We lost control.” Mansfield has seen 4,300 jobs created since Labour lost power, up by almost 10 per cent. In Glasgow, which also cameos in the film’s disaster zones, unemployment has almost halved. Corbyn is selling a fiction, but at least he has a story. It’s not clear that the same can be said about the Conservatives.