It’s back to school this week for MPs and government ministers – and few can be facing a more challenging new term than Rachel Reeves. After being moved to tears in the unforgiving glare of the cameras before the summer break, the chancellor’s allies say she is returning to the frontline with a renewed sense of purpose. She is ready, as the kids would say, to “lock in”.
But team Reeves is also well aware of the scale of the economic and political obstacles ahead. Most pressing, yet out of the chancellor’s hands, is the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) summer “supply stocktake” of its economic model.
