What a week. Seven days ago, we were wondering what Rachel Reeves was up to with her pre-Budget messaging. At the start of this week the future of the Prime Minister was seriously called into doubt with a bunch of calamitous late-night briefings to the media. At the end of the daftest seven days in British politics since 2022, it’s as if the Chancellor called up No. 10 and said: ‘Hold my beer.’ At 10 p.m. yesterday, the FT – the constitutionally expected route through which the Treasury leaks – revealed that Labour is ditching plans to raise income tax by 2p in the pound. One Labour MP noted: ‘We rolled the pitch all right, but we’ve rolled the wrong pitch.’
This is, to put it politely, an utter shambles, but it is one which is becoming typical
It took 11 hours before someone informed Bloomberg that the reason for the change was not that Keir Starmer and Reeves are caving in again to their backbenchers, but that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had found the state of the public finances to be better than expected. Some £6 billion had been found down the back of the sofa. Even then there was a suggestion that income tax thresholds might be cut, something the Times was then told is not the case. This is, to put it politely, an utter shambles, but it is one which is becoming typical.
It is a running joke in two of my large Westminster WhatsApp groups – populated by a collection of ne’er-do-wells from journalism and the ranks of the adviser class, both serving and retired – that MPs and ministers regularly greet any problem they wish to disown as a ‘comms problem’. The communications team is rarely to blame; the problem is invariably the policy or the, often inadequate, politicians. But on this occasion, a government reeling from all the bad news proved equally unable to capitalise on the good news.
‘The gods chose for the first time in weeks to shine upon this government,’ bemoaned a source close to No. 10, ‘and we flunked it. We could have gone out and said the economy is better than we feared and we no longer need to raise income tax. The markets would have applauded. Then we could have said in the coming days that the changes we will make will be designed to protect working people.’ Instead, the markets became jittery that Reeves had caved to the left again. From the jaws of order, new chaos was snatched.
The bigger issue, of course, is that it’s not just the comms which is malfunctioning, but the whole of government: the political operation, the civil service from the leadership of a pallid prime minister down. George Osborne had an omnishambles Budget, this is an omnishambles government.
You see this with some administrations; they reek of a kind of cancer of the soul, where gaffes and mistakes become elevated into symbols of failure and sap the will of those working there so they are even less able to perform. ‘I would laugh if I didn’t want to cry,’ a special adviser remarked to me this afternoon.
Budgets are force multipliers. If you’re a government striding forward, they are a brilliant opportunity to shape the political agenda and deliver a narrative to the public of what you’re about, who you’re for and who you’re against. Osborne and Gordon Brown were both masters of these theatrics. But for governments in trouble, those that are rudderless and at the mercy of events, they are a perfect storm of economic and political peril. And there are still 12 days for the storm to rage.
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