Much of Rachel Reeves’s Budget was unprecedented: the leaking, the speculation and the OBR accidentally uploading its details an hour early. This morning, Keir Starmer added another entry on that list. The Prime Minister assembled the nation’s journalists to lecture them about the many wonderful things contained in his neighbour’s Budget – something Reeves surely ought to have done in her own speech last Wednesday.
Starmer rattled off a list of policies announced last week: frozen rail fares, prescription charges and fuel duty, childcare costs slashed and £150 off energy bills. But, naturally, all the waiting hacks wanted to ask him about was the central question which dominated the weekend broadcast rounds. Did Rachel Reeves lie about the size of the black hole in the run-up to the Budget? No, claimed Starmer. ‘There was no misleading – I simply don’t accept it. And I was receiving the numbers.’ Instead, the Prime Minister insisted, the blame for the confusion lies elsewhere – with the OBR.
Reeves’s future has been the subject of great press speculation over the weekend
He criticised the watchdog for failing to publish the productivity review, which wiped £16 billion off the headroom available to Reeves. Starmer argued it would have been better if that had been carried out at the end of the last parliament, suggesting he is now stuck with ‘picking up the tab for the last government’s failure’. Asked specifically about the leak which occurred on Wednesday, Starmer called it a ‘serious error’ of ‘market-sensitive information’ – a remark which does not bode well for the OBR when it publishes the findings of its investigation at 2:30 p.m. today.
The other subject of interest from today’s speech was Starmer’s remarks on welfare reform. The Prime Minister insisted that this is his ‘moral mission’, declaring that his government ‘can’t leave the best part of a million young people not learning or earning’. Yet that seems remarkably incongruous, given Reeves just greenlit welfare spending rising by an additional £12 billion by the fiscal year 2029-30. When pressed by journalists, Starmer refused to commit to welfare spending being reduced by the next election.
Reeves’s future has been the subject of great press speculation over the weekend. But the fact that the Prime Minister is so willing to go out and publicly defend his Chancellor suggests that he believes that the pair’s fate is bound together. With Reeves set to endure a difficult Treasury select committee hearing tomorrow, Starmer is giving no public indication that the Chancellor is going anywhere anytime soon.
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