Reeves's tax 'waffle bomb' has detonated under Labour

What a chaotic moment on Downing Street. On Wednesday, just before someone speaking on the prime minister’s behalf decided to pour petrol on the fire of leadership speculation, Starmer and Reeves “ripped up” their plans for the Budget.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Reeves wrote to the Office of Budget Responsibility to set out the “major measures” that she intended to announce so that the OBR could mark her homework and estimate the effect on the public finances. A rise in the basic rate of income tax was not one of them.

It is a screeching U-turn and one that stinks of panic. The less benign explanation for it is that decision-making at the heart of government is chaotic, as the anonymous briefing against Wes Streeting suggests. I still do not believe that Reeves’s “scene-setter” speech was some too-clever-by-half attempt at expectations management - making everyone fear an income-tax rise so that they would be relieved when it didn’t happen.

It also smacks of an overly jittery reaction to a previous round of OBR forecasts that convinced Starmer and Reeves that the Budget was going to be such a political disaster that they would have to prepare the markets and public opinion for it. That would fit with the briefing against Streeting, if Starmer thought the reaction to the Budget would be so bad that his job would be at risk.