Reeves v the OBR – what really happened

The rebuke to the chancellor was unmistakable, and intended to hurt.

- Will Hutton

After the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) inadvertently published the November budget online an hour before Rachel Reeves delivered it, its chair, Richard Hughes, offered his resignation five days later. It was instantly accepted. Revenge, it seems, is a dish best served cold: last week Hughes served his practically frozen.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords economic affairs committee, he laid out the depth of his disillusion with, and disagreement over, the chancellor’s economic leadership. In his view, the country is now running dangerous - even existential - medium-term fiscal risks, for which Reeves cannot escape responsibility.

Her first crime, Hughes argued, was to be party to Labour misleading the nation in its 2024 election manifesto by suggesting that it would be “only raising and then spending £8bn or £9bn by the end of the life of this parliament”. In reality, he declared, “if you look at their first budget they raised £40bn in tax and spent £70bn. So it was nothing like what their actual plan ... turned out to be in government”. Such a betrayal of trust, he suggested, should never be allowed to happen again - perhaps through independent audits of party manifestos.