Good times for Britain when the chancellor is saved by the Office for Budget Responsibility being slightly more inept than her at a single convenient moment. Following the accidental early publication of the fiscal watchdog’s market-sensitive budget document, chair Richard Hughes has now fallen on his sword. Although it’s possible he meant to fall on his feet but just mistimed it. On Monday we discovered that the OBR’s website is not securely hosted but was built using WordPress. Oh man. That’s definitely budget, but is it responsible? It may as well just have had a Tumblr.
This series of unfortunate events meant the OBR bigwigs were a man down when they appeared before the Treasury select committee this morning, butching out the decision to go to war with Rachel Reeves by releasing their draft economic assessments in the weeks leading up to the budget. Did the chancellor seriously mislead the country about the state of the public finances? That is the £4.2bn question. Are our problems going to turn out to be a whole lot bigger than something that could be addressed with £4.2bn? The answer to that is regrettably too obvious to state.
