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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 too state.
Even so, we must return to the chancellor’s endlessly self-referenced black hole, which seems in fact to have been a multibillion-pound surplus. Astrophysically speaking, there may be precedents for what Reeves did. Back in 2019, some astronomers breathlessly reported the discovery of a Milky Way black hole so massive that it actually contradicted known stellar-evolution theory. Unfortunately, follow-up research revealed the black hole didn’t actually exist at all, and was just an illusory light effect.
Quite embarrassing at Big Astronomy’s annual Christmas drinks, no doubt, but obviously much less cosmically excruciating than Reeves’s weirdo press conference nearly four weeks ago, in which she kept warning she was facing “the world as it is”. It’s possible the chancellor needs to employ a science consultant in the vein of those ones who advise Marvel movies, and make assessments like “if there was a substance you couldn’t touch, it’s my considered and lucrative opinion that Agent Carter could move it using magnetic fields”. Or: “Yeah, a wormhole called the Devil’s Anus could definitely transport Thor and Hulk back to Asgard.” Or: “A black hole of £20bn could simultaneously be a surplus of £4.2bn, and also in no way mark the event horizon of your frontbench career.”
And with that, let us take a highly scientific quantum leap to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is also, unsurprisingly, attempting to butch things out. Most recent Labour leaders have had a fundamental/fundamentalist belief in their own moral rectitude. It is one of the rare shared traits to unite Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn, two men who always see the very best in themselves. And there is increasingly no denying that the current PM has grown swiftly into this tradition. “I am proud to have scrapped the two-child limit,” Keir intoned yesterday, in a speech designed to shore up the budget, “proud to have lifted half a million children out of poverty.” Fascinating to hear that Starmer is extremely proud of doing something that he last year suspended seven of his MPs for voting for.
As indicated, the rolling budget fiasco had coaxed Starmer out of his bunker and into a London community centre on Monday morning, where he offered a bullish defence of the budget to remind the world that if they wanted to bring down his chancellor, they would have to go through him first. An ultimatum to which the prevalent answer among the general public would be: fine, let’s do this. We’re literally free right now.
But politicians are more sophisticated and special, aren’t they? Thus Labour malcontents keep briefing that they are waiting for what are widely expected to be disastrous local election results in May before moving against Starmer. This feels like me briefing that I am waiting for the toddler to drop the vase before I remove the vase from the toddler. It’s apparently called being strategic: look it up.
So in the absence of anyone having anything in the same galaxy as a plan, we keep being advised to simply accept that Starmer and Reeves come as a package. Yet in truth, they are an odd pairing. Reeves presents herself as the hapless victim of circumstance who has little free will in any matters at all. “Any chancellor of any party would be standing here today, facing the choices I face … ” Starmer, on the other hand, presents himself as a man of action who can nonetheless deliver a two-and-a-half-thousand-word speech featuring only a handful of verbs.
For a man who chides populist opposition politicians for offering “easy answers”, the prime minister doesn’t half rely on some himself. It seems to be different when he does it, though. Not to play the hotshot economist, but anyone can reduce energy bills if they raise the sums people are required to pay in tax. And I’m not saying anyone could trumpet “our free childcare expansion”, but the Tories could, since the policy of expanding free childcare to 30 hours by this September was, in fact, a pledge made in 2023 by the previous chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.
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Or, as Starmer put it yesterday: “We will keep going, we will continue to reject drift, to confront reality … ” Will we? Or will we just continue bobbing along on this five-year absence of mission, led – not remotely boldly – by the captain of the Starship Lack-of-Enterprise?
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
