Finally. After the days of obfuscation, deflection and flat-out lying surrounding Rachel Reeves‘s Budget deceit, Kemi Badenoch has cut through to the heart of the issue.
Tuesday saw the scandal’s first resignation, with Office for Budget Responsibility head Richard Hughes falling on his calculator after the leak of his organisation’s Budget report 45 minutes before the Chancellor addressed the Commons. It had been, he said, ‘a technical but serious error’.
Though rumour holds he was pushed by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, who were desperate to find a scapegoat for the most shambolic fiscal event in modern parliamentary history. Yet in their willingness to sacrifice Hughes, they made a fatal blunder. One that the Leader of the Opposition exploited to ruthless effect at Prime Minister’s Questions today.
Given Sir Keir Starmer had accepted Hughes’s resignation, she asked provocatively: Did he believe people should step down when they are in charge of organisations that ‘descend into a total shambles’? Starmer tried to waffle and evade.
At which point Badenoch pinned him to the wall. The head of the OBR had quit because his organisation had mistakenly leaked sensitive economic information less than an hour before the Budget was officially published. But the Chancellor and her aides had been doing the same over a period of weeks, she pointed out.
Tuesday saw the scandal’s first resignation, with Office for Budget Responsibility head Richard Hughes falling on his calculator after the leak of his organisation’s Budget report 45 minutes before the Chancellor addressed the Commons
This had destabilised the markets. Hundreds of thousands of pensioners had rushed to withdraw their funds early. The briefings hadn’t just damaged the economy, but were a potential breach of Financial Conduct Authority regulations. So if Hughes had to take responsibility, why not ministers? Would the Prime Minister ensure Reeves complied with an investigation to get to the bottom of the matter?
I was watching their exchange from my place in the Parliamentary press gallery. And from that vantage point, you can tell when Starmer is in trouble. His body tenses. He leans into the despatch box, as if for support. His eyes begin to flick ever more desperately to his briefing book, in the hope salvation is lurking somewhere in its pages.
And, the biggest tell of all, he becomes abusive. ‘She’s losing the plot’, Starmer spat.
What he noticeably didn’t do was agree to ensure his Chancellor would co-operate with any investigation into the chaos of the past month. For a simple reason: he knows Rachel Reeves is bang to rights. As one minister told me on Tuesday, ‘He knows that if the FCA investigates, Reeves is toast.’
That she lied to the country in her emergency press conference of November 4 is now a matter of established fact. As even the BBC’s highly respected political editor Chris Mason wrote on Monday, ‘the words on the day left an impression not at one with the facts we were later to discover, and which the Chancellor knew at the time’.
That Reeves’s statements and briefings undermined British business – and by so doing, the economy – is similarly a matter of fact. Questioned by the Treasury Select Committee yesterday, Professor David Miles, a member of the OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee, confirmed that the erosion of confidence ‘may well have been exacerbated by leaks, which some days seemed to be suggesting one thing and the next day something different’.
What Keir Starmer noticeably didn’t do was agree to ensure his Chancellor would co-operate with any investigation into the chaos of the past month. For a simple reason: he knows Rachel Reeves is bang to rights.
If Richard Hughes had to take responsibility, why not ministers? Would the Prime Minister ensure Reeves complied with an investigation to get to the bottom of the matter?
What Keir Starmer noticeably didn’t do was agree to ensure his Chancellor would co-operate with any investigation into the chaos of the past month.
But most serious – and again incontestable – is how Reeves and her team themselves leaked highly market-sensitive information. As Miles confirmed: ‘I think it was clear that there was lots of information appearing in the Press which perhaps wouldn’t normally be out there and that this wasn’t from our point of view particularly helpful.’
I’m told it is this final point that lies behind Starmer’s defensiveness. As a minister tells me: ‘They panicked. They saw the markets reacting badly to the briefings and started to feed out data from the OBR report to try to correct [this]. And that’s a clear regulatory breach.’
At the start of PMQs there was a moment of choreography as Starmer and Reeves entered the chamber together. It was designed to present them united in the face of a Budget backlash, which sees the voters viewing them as less trustworthy on the economy than Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
But it was also forced. I understand Starmer has assured Reeves he’ll stand by her as long as no fresh revelations about her Budget mismanagement emerge. ‘He’s been burnt by the [Angela] Rayner saga,’ an MP reveals, referencing her assurances she had paid the appropriate amount of tax, only for the truth to emerge a few days later. ‘His support is not unconditional.’
Wisely. In the Rayner scandal, the Prime Minister was genuinely blindsided by his deputy’s financial mismanagement.
But Starmer is only too aware of the extent to which Reeves dissembled, distorted and deceived in a vain attempt to justify her Budget tax bombshell.
And now, despite Sir Keir’s increasingly petulant attempts at evasion today, so are the British people.
