The Office for Budget Responsibility, a very dull organisation that somehow manages to regularly place itself in the middle of vast controversies, was conceived by George Osborne as a poison pill to embarrass future Labour governments. In his wildest fantasies, he can’t have imagined that it would manage to do so as completely as it did on Wednesday, leaking the entire Budget three quarters of an hour before Rachel Reeves even stood up.
In fairness, they did take the document down after half an hour. Just 29 minutes and 59.9 seconds too late. At one level, an hour or two doesn’t matter: it was all the same by half past one. This was not how it felt at the time. Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, declared portentously that the leak “may indeed constitute a criminal act”. When the news went round the Commons during Scottish Questions it, it roused the whole chamber.
Suddenly, we had the joy of watching Treasury ministers, usually so calm on Budget day, scrambling to respond. As Keir Starmer began answering Prime Minister’s Questions, Reeves, next to him, was typing on her phone. She turned to Torsten Bell, a Treasury ministersitting behind her, to check he’d seen it. Behind us in the press gallery, the government spinners were all busy with their own phones, one of them typing into two devices simultaneously.
The best jokes are the ones between people facing the worst circumstances
Bell and Reeves swapped some more messages, and then James Murray, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, held Reeves’ phone for her while she pulled a pen out and carefully copied down a new introduction to her Budget speech. Yvette Cooper, completely ignoring the prime minister, leaned over to see what it said. Reeves passed her handwritten note back to Bell so that he could check it, and then said something to Murray that made them both laugh. The best jokes are the ones between people facing the worst circumstances.
Things were scarcely less busy on the opposite bench. Budget responses are usually a nightmare for opposition leaders, who arrive with skeleton speeches that they must rapidly rewrite as the Chancellor makes announcements, with the assistance of a backroom staff sitting in the Shadow Cabinet room behind the Speaker’s chair, crunching numbers and passing notes into the chamber. This time, their job was rather easier. Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, even had time to leave and consult. Every so often during PMQs and Reeves’ subsequent speech, a folder would be passed along the frontbench containing new pages for Badenoch. John Glen, her Parliamentary aide and a former City minister, leaned forward over her shoulder to explain key points that the OBR document had made clear. Maybe the leak was deliberate. We shouldn’t exclude the possibility that Labour is keen to see Badenoch survive as far as an election.
The chamber as a whole was so raucous that Speaker Lindsay Hoyle was threatening to send everyone home before Reeves had even begun. “If you do not want the Budget, make your minds up now,” he told Labour MPs. “Nobody wants this Budget,” Badenoch told him.
We can pass over PMQs: the prime minister’s answer to everything was to denounce the Liz Truss minibudget. He refused to get drawn on details. “It’s literally 25 minutes before the Budget will be set out in full,” he told Badenoch. Or 25 minutes since you’d been able to read it if you had access to the internet. “I know what it feels like to sit around the kitchen table worrying about bills,” the prime minister intoned, somehow failing to add: “And soon, so will everyone else!”
Badenoch asked questions about the general chaos, which elicited one answer that could become important. “No one in Number 10 has briefed against Cabinet ministers,” Starmer declared. We may find ourselves coming back to that particular hostage to journalism.
When Reeves rose to speak, it was almost anticlimactic: we’d had weeks of leaks and briefings, including one extraordinary speech from the chancellor herself. Now we’d had the detail too. There was little left for her to reveal. She should have taken note. Her big announcement was the abolition of the two-child cap on benefits. There was a long, long build-up to this, but we’d all seen the rabbit going into the hat, and been updated regularly on its precise location, so there was no real drama about her pulling it out. Labour MPs cheered with great feeling. A cynic next to me pointed out that many of them had spent the previous couple of years defending the cap, but of course that is why they are so pleased to see it go.
There was a great deal of shouting from both sides. Ric Holden, the Shadow Cabinet’s chief sledger, had positioned himself out of sight of the Speaker’s chair, and alternated between typing into his phone and yelling things at Reeves accompanied by gestures that showed his views about the economy’s direction of travel. Sitting behind the chancellor, Treasury minister Bell replied with his own gestures. He once heard a story about an MP who was held back by modesty, and is determined that it won’t happen to him.
Reeves had a weakish gag about Green leader Zack Polanski, but frankly it’s a win for him to be even mentioned. “We are ramping up sanctions on Russia and freezing known Russian assets,” Reeves said. “There’s one!” shouted a Labour MP, pointing at Nigel Farage. He is usually delighted by the attention, but this time looked sour, like a prefect who’s been invited to the headmaster’s study to explain why he keep goosestepping round the playground.
In general, it was unclear what Reeves’s message was. She kept telling us about “my choices” but what were these? At one moment, she told us working people would “have more money in their pockets”, and at another that “I am asking everyone to make a contribution” to the country’s welfare. Although it was a bit more than “asking”. I don’t think there’ll be a box on the tax return where we can decline her request.
