Sweaty palms. A sinking stomach. Hundreds of new Slack notifications. When you mess up to epic proportions at work, it can feel similar to having heart failure. Which is why, a Whitehall insider said they were sure someone “quite junior” at the Office for Budget Responsibility was having “the worst day of their working life” after Rachel Reeve’s budget was accidentally published 40 minutes early on the organisation’s website this week.
While it has since emerged that an “external person” may have been responsible, it remains that someone somewhere wasn’t doing their job properly. The release of market-sensitive information saw bond prices and sterling start to shift as billions of pounds of trades were executed in the wake of the news. The yield on 10-year UK government bonds dropped by four basis points, while the pound jumped 0.3 per cent. “I think I need a red box, I can deliver the Budget now in the studio… It tells you all the measures,” the BBC political editor Chris Mason said on Politics Live, while Reeves glanced down worriedly at her phone in the Commons.
