This cowardly Budget marks the death of New Labour

There was a time not too long ago when it looked like the influence of New Labour on Keir Starmer’s government looked strong.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Rachel Reeves took advice from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before writing her Budget. She acted on Brown’s advice, offered in public, to end the two-child limit on benefits, but inevitably his suggestion that it could be paid for by higher taxes on gambling turned out to be unrealistic. Most of the cost will be met from other taxes.

Blair's advice was given in private, and so we can only guess at what it might have been. But one thing we can be sure of is that whatever Budget he urged her to deliver was not the Budget she set out on Wednesday.

Indeed, this Budget marks the death of New Labour. Despite Blairites in key posts at all levels of the government, like sentinels of an empire in exile, the dynamo of a Blairite prime minister is missing. Reeves even name-checked Alan Milburn in her Budget statement; Jonathan Powell is the real foreign secretary; and Morgan McSweeney, the No 10 chief of staff, is a Blue-Labour-tinged Blairite (he ran Liz Kendall's leadership campaign a decade ago, after all). But Starmer is not a Blairite.