Like the office whip-round that no one can really avoid

Rachel Reeves entered the Commons on a job-saving mission – starting with her own.

- ANNE MCELVOY

The autumn Budget is one of the showbiz events of the Westminster year, a mixture of mojo, magic accounting and the undodgeable trade-offs of tax, spending and borrowing.

It was also a day when she had a personal ghost to exorcise - the memory of her personal meltdown this summer as her welfare reform plans were eviscerated by Labour backbenchers and her misery was on display. One advantage beckoned today. Someone in SW1 was having a worse day than she was: namely Richard Hughes, the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, whose team had managed to leak the Budget an hour before delivery, in an as-yet unwritten episode of The Thick of It.

Reeves was wearing one of those tie-neck blouses only ever seen in shops for female City board members, her hair and makeup also setting her up for battle mode. As a comeback vibe, it was not as exciting as her supporters had hoped, but not as shaky as her detractors had predicted either. She had a couple of zingers aimed at Nigel Farage and the Conservatives but, still, no one ever died of dramatic overexcitement listening to The Rachel Show.

The OBR blunder, however, offered the chance to do what the chancellor does well, which is to look and sound cross in the way Labour has of permanent annoyance at other people's frailties while unaware of its own. The leak was “deeply disappointing” and a “serious error”, she rapped. Thank goodness nothing ever goes wrong in the leaking of muddled messaging from No 11.