The Chancellor of the Exchequer, as those who follow such things will be aware, is known in Westminster as “spreadsheet Phil”.

Philip Hammond is also not known for having a sense of humour, so it was a surprise to find him not only taking ownership of that moniker in his first Budget, but also wise-crack his way through what many expected to be a very boring speech.

Mr Hammond, naturally, likes numbers. Well-known for being able to scan a spreadsheet and instantly spot an erroneous figure, he dazzled MPs yesterday afternoon with lots and lots of statistics. It was a Budget, after all, the last spring statement before a much-heralded move to the autumn.

But beyond the unexpected humour, it was safety first. Although, the Chancellor didn’t deny the UK’s colossal debt levels (£1.7 trillion!), nor did he properly acknowledge the potential economic impact of Brexit. He is among the Cabinet’s realists on this front, so that wasn’t insignificant.

Nor does spreadsheet Phil do gimmicks and, relatively speaking, his Budget statement was free of the headline-grabbing initiatives favoured by his predecessor. There was an extra £2 billion for social care services in England, help for firms hit by business rate rises, a prediction of higher-than-expected growth (and lower borrowing) and more funding for “free” schools.

There was also some fairly anodyne British Unionism at play. A cash boost for English authorities, something awkwardly called the “Midlands Engine” (shades of George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”), and of course Barnett consequentials for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the last of which will get £350 million extra, a mix of revenue and capital, and most of which will make its way north over the next year.

With that announcement, the Chancellor gesticulated playfully towards the inevitably surly SNP benches (whose occupants like to pretend the Barnett Formula doesn’t exist). The Scottish Government, of course, can spend this as they see fit, prompting the Scottish Conservatives to argue planned tax increases could, in fact, be scrapped.

When it came to North Sea oil, spreadsheet Phil announced a review rather than any immediate relief, as requested by the SNP. His purpose was to keep the black stuff flowing rather than necessarily extract any additional revenue; a formal discussion paper was promised in due course. An Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) report, meanwhile, showed a downgrading of its forecast for offshore receipts by 37 per cent since last November.

Thus the UK Treasury is now expected to receive £4.6bn between 2017-18 and 2021-22, down £2.7bn on that projected late last year. In other words, oil revenues are no longer expected to make a significant fiscal contribution to Treasury coffers. The point, of course, in publishing these figures alongside the Budget was to remind punters the Scottish Government, during the (first) independence referendum, had projected revenues of up to £11.8bn in 2017-18 alone. That was almost comically wide of the mark.

Thus, concluded the Chancellor (deploying the Royal “we”), “we are stronger together in this great United Kingdom”. Reading between the lines: not only would an independent Scotland not have any oil, it wouldn’t have Barnett consequentials either (indeed, no Barnett Formula). Now this balance-sheet approach is all well and good, but I couldn’t help feeling that whereas spreadsheet Phil might have made a compelling Unionist in the 1950s, such an approach will have less of an impact in 2017/18.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, there was the usual May-esque, post-Brexit rhetoric about the government being on the people’s “side”. Talent, declared the Chancellor, “should be the only driver”. This, however, sat uneasily with Mr Hammond’s raid on the UK’s self-employed, even more so given it followed a sustained paean to how amazing they were; crucial, as it were, to the post-2010 jobs “miracle”.

In essence, from April 2018 the main rate of Class 4 National Insurance Contributions (NICs) for the self-employed will increase by 1 per cent to 10 per cent, with a further 1 per cent increase the following year. Spreadsheet Phil’s rationale was that charging the self-employed lower NI than those in salaried employment wasn’t “fair”, although this begged an obvious question: is it “fair” that the self-employed don’t get many of the benefits (sickness and holiday pay, for example) their full-time colleagues do?

Mr Hammond didn’t address that point. Briefing suggested it was a quid pro quo for changes to the state pension under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition (which benefitted the self-employed), so having given with the one hand (though that had been a Liberal Democrat measure), Mr Hammond was taking away with the other. Tory colleagues protested that anyone earning less than £16,250 wouldn’t see a reduction in their total NIC bill, but that seemed scant comfort.

In post-Budget interviews, Conservatives also wriggled when asked if this measure broke a clear 2015 manifesto pledge not to increase NI, VAT or income tax. David Mundell, the Secretary of State for Scotland, told BBC Scotland he didn’t want to get into a “technical” discussion, which was at least a novel means of ducking the point. In this post-truth world, manifesto pledges no longer seem to mean much.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron later christened it an “omNICshambles”, although one suspects that description will struggle to catch on. And the revenue impact? A piffling £145m for the Treasury, mere pocket-money in public spending terms. Most striking was the un-Tory nature of the Chancellor’s announcement. What would the late Mrs Thatcher make of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – taxing the “strivers”, those who have struck out on their own at little cost to the State?

A better Leader of the Opposition might have made such a point, but instead a predictably awful Jeremy Corbyn read out a response which sounded as if it had been copy-and-pasted several weeks in response. Taunting Labour had earlier brought forth a particularly rich seam of humour from spreadsheet Phil: “They don’t call it the last Labour government for nothing!”

The Chancellor’s statement had reached its conclusion with a dizzying number of clichés; the UK, he told MPs, had a “remarkable history” and had “done great things together”, although he felt confident its “greatest achievements” remained “ahead of us”. There was a final platitudinous flourish about the next “chapter of history” building a “stronger, fairer, better Britain”. Just not if you’re self-employed.