It may not be enough

Crisis averted for now but danger lurks ahead

- Pippa Crerar

When Rachel Reeves urged Labour MPs at a half-empty private meeting on Monday night to back her high-stakes budget, she told them that while they might not like everything in it, she was convinced that overall it was fair.

After weeks of backbench anxiety over manifesto breaches and speculation over Keir Starmer’s leadership, she was determined to reassure them that her plans were Labour through and through - and would give them plenty to offer voters on the doorstep.

“A budget involves choices. Choices are things that we do, and also things that we don’t do. I hope that you like every single measure but you might not. The budget is a package. It’s not a pick and mix,” she told them.

But one of the chancellor’s biggest dangers as her budget is absorbed by the public and, crucially, Labour MPs and the markets in the coming days, is that it ends up looking like a handful of ideas grabbed at random.

After dropping plans for a manifesto-busting income tax rate rise because of higher wage growth and destabilising speculation over Starmer’s future, Reeves has been forced to bring in a much broader mix of measures.

The risk of it all unravelling is high. Labour figures are anxious about a repeat of George Osborne’s notorious omnishambles budget. “There are now multiple opportunities for it all to go wrong,” says one Downing Street insider.

It was not meant to be this way. Back in July, when she first gathered her Treasury officials to start drawing up the budget, the chancellor had a firm idea of her strategic priorities: cut NHS waiting lists, pay off the national debt and cut the cost of living.