The morning after the day and night before. Traditionally the time by which any budget that is going to unravel has started to do so. No wonder Rachel Reeves sounded relatively chipper on the morning media round. OK, her budget hadn’t been declared the greatest ever by the Daily Telegraph, but then she was no Kwasi Kwarteng. And Keir Starmer was no Liz Truss.
The haters were always going to hate; you could disagree with the politics but the numbers more or less appeared to add up. Well, as much as any chancellor’s numbers ever do. Even the International Monetary Fund had given her the thumbs up. This for a chancellor was about as good as it gets. Everyone knows that all budgets are launched on a wing and a prayer. Graveyards of broken promises. Huge sums of money spent and raised on assumptions that would be laughed at by a bank manager if you tried them out on your own finances.
Reeves’s biggest hurdle of the morning was the obligatory 8.10am slot on Radio 4’s Today programme. Nick Robinson began by observing that the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting minimal growth. Rachel had answered this one countless times before in previous interviews so she had her answer ready prepared.
This was just her first budget and she wasn’t responsible for the state of the public finances. Given time, she hoped she would outperform the forecasts. Robinson gave her the benefit of the doubt on this. Other listeners with longer memories who are used to being let down by politicians may have been wondering if things were not so bad now that 1.4% growth may even be wishful thinking.
The tricky questions came thick and fast. Had she lied to the country when she had promised that spending would be paid for by growth rather than borrowing? When she had said that every policy would be fully funded and costed. That the only taxes to be going up were the ones in their manifesto.
Here it might have been nice to have heard the truth. Politicians always talk about their desire to level with the country. To treat voters as grown ups. But then they always do the precise opposite. For the reality is that Reeves made those promises because she felt they were necessary to win the election. She didn’t believe them at the time, neither did she expect voters to. They were all just part of the game.
If Reeves had said that, it would have been the start of a proper conversation. But she is not that kind of person. Nor is any politician from any party. The charade of dishonesty must be sustained at all costs. As if no one in the country ever feels duped.
So the fictions went on. She had had no idea just how bad the public finances were when she made those promises. Reader, she did. We all did. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had been shouting about a £20bn black hole for months.
She hadn’t raised corporation tax. Yes, but she had raised national insurance. And no it wasn’t a tax on working people even though she had said it was. The interview went on like this for about 15 minutes ending in a no-score draw. Robinson making no real headway and Reeves answering the questions she wished she had been asked. Rachel would have definitely settled for that at the start. She’s getting a lot better at these gigs.
Next it was the turn of Jeremy Hunt, making his swansong appearance as shadow chancellor. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for him. He was never very good at being chancellor – he was only chosen because he looked vaguely plausible – and he’s always exposed in interviews. His main aim was to absolve himself from claims be had misled the OBR. To be fair, he probably didn’t mean to. He just didn’t understand the numbers he was presented with. But mislead them he did.
Jezza then tried to deliver his own version of the budget. The public finances were in a desperate state, he said – one day he will find out which chancellor had been in charge of them – but he had a brilliant solution. Rather than raising taxes like Labour he was going to just slash the welfare bill. There were too many people with disabilities claiming benefits. This was the non-austerity return to austerity plan. Disability and poverty were just a state of mind. I’m going to miss him when he’s gone. Though I doubt many others will. You don’t often get to sketch that perfect storm of ineptitude.
The last hurdle for Reeves was the IFS press conference. The near-enough definitive verdict from the only people who really understand the intricacies of a budget. And that includes the Treasury. The IFS has been doing its day-after-budget analyses for years now and they have become a must-watch for any politics and economics geek. They used to be live events but are now done online. Presumably to make it easier for chancellors to save their blushes and tune in anonymously. It’s the only way Rachel Reeves ever gets to find out what she’s actually done.
As ever it was the IFS’s director, Paul Johnson, who introduced proceedings. And, as ever, in his understated way, he wasn’t wholly complimentary. He never is. He’s yet to find a budget that survives contact with reality. It beats me why chancellors don’t co-opt him into their Treasury team to talk them through the consequences of their political choices. That way there would be at least one person who knows what they are doing. As it is, he is there to put into words what the rest of us are feeling. That all budgets have a large element of smoke and mirrors. We know we are being lied to, we just don’t know how. His is the Revenge of the Nerd.
Look, he said. There were some bits of the budget that weren’t too bad. Changing the fiscal rules. Spending more. But to a large extent it was a triumph of hope. Reeves would run out of cash, headroom was tight, growth was going to flatline. All the usuals. But, hey, it was a lot better than all the recent Tory budgets so there was that. And Labour probably couldn’t have done too much better given the mess it inherited. Give it a B--.
Reeves could die happy. She would have settled for that. Her budget was still intact. That was all that mattered. She had made her choices. Now she had four more years to turn them into a reality. And there was always the next budget to put things right.
• A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
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