DAN HODGES: Reeves’ assault canine berated me for saying she lied concerning the Budget. But even Larry the Downing Street cat is aware of I’m proper
Rachel Reeves has lied again. At Treasury Questions, the first since her great Budget deception was exposed by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), she was confronted by Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride: ‘May I ask the Chancellor a simple question? Did she at any point authorise or allow confidential details of the Budget or the forecast to be briefed to the Press – yes or no?’
‘No,’ she replied.
But she did. And everyone in Westminster – Keir Starmer, her Cabinet colleagues, the Press, backbench Labour MPs, Tory MPs, Larry the Downing Street cat – knows it.
There is so much evidence that Reeves knowingly authorised the detailed leaking of her Budget and the OBR’s forecasts that more smoking guns are lying around the Treasury than there were after the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
Angrily
We know she was leaking the OBR’s forecast because the OBR was forced to pick up the phone to the Treasury to ask her to stop.
As Professor David Miles, head of the fiscal watchdog’s budget responsibility committee, told MPs last week: ‘I think it was clear that there was lots of information appearing in the Press which perhaps wouldn’t normally be out there and that this wasn’t from our point of view particularly helpful . . . we made it clear that they were not helpful and that we weren’t in a position of course to put them right.’
‘There is so much evidence that Chancellor Rachel Reeves knowingly authorised the detailed leaking of her Budget and the OBR’s forecasts’
We know she was briefing the Press on her Budget because Cabinet ministers were angrily contacting journalists last week to complain that she’d given precisely the same briefings to them. We also know that a number of the briefings were deliberately authorised because they were authoritative, accurate and purposely designed to manipulate the financial markets.
For example, on November 14 journalists were specifically told that Reeves would not have to raise the basic rate of income tax because of an improved OBR forecast, and that she would opt to freeze tax thresholds instead. That was exactly what had happened: the OBR had indeed provided a less pessimistic assessment of the state of the finances, and the markets duly stabilised.
The evidence that Keir Starmer was fully aware of these briefings and counter-briefings is also supported by reliable sources. Most notably, the Prime Minister himself. Last week, Starmer confirmed there had indeed been discussions within government about raising the top rate of income tax, that the decision had been postponed after the receipt of the more positive OBR data, and that a decision to freeze tax thresholds had been taken instead. Again, all this had been briefed at the time, and again, those briefings had proven to be eerily accurate.
But perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence that Rachel Reeves was briefing out her Budget weeks before it was delivered was the way in which every major Budget measure had appeared in the Press in advance. The freezing of the thresholds. The imposition of a mansion tax. The decision to axe the two-child benefit cap.
When I interviewed Kemi Badenoch about her widely praised response to the Budget she shrugged and told me: ‘To be honest, it was easy. The whole thing had already been laid out by her.’
The only possible defence Rachel Reeves can mount to the charge she was behind the briefings – and has therefore lied to the House of Commons – is one that casts her in an even worse light than the accusation of perfidy. Which is that she is so utterly incompetent and detached from her brief that she had no idea this avalanche of information was pouring out of her Treasury on a daily basis. And to be fair, competence is not a word that readily attaches itself to our Chancellor.
‘The evidence that Keir Starmer was fully aware of these briefings and counter-briefings is also supported by reliable sources’
But, while she may be economically inept, she did not spend the months leading up to the Budget living in a cave. She knew full well what was coming out of her department, and why.
If, as she is attempting to claim, all these leaks were conducted without her knowledge and consent, they amount to the worst breach of internal government security of modern times. They would necessitate an investigation not just by the Cabinet Office and the Financial Conduct Authority but by the police.
Temerity
But Reeves has publicly stated there is no need for such an investigation. And the reason she has said that is she knows full well how the details of her Budget and the OBR forecasts entered the public domain. Because she placed them there herself.
Over the past week, the Chancellor and her allies have embarked on a concerted attempt to gaslight the British people and attack anyone who has the temerity to highlight her lies and deceit.
On Saturday, Tom Baldwin – a journalist who doubles as an unofficial spokesman, adviser and pistolero to Starmer and Reeves – took to a podcast to castigate me for accusing the Chancellor of lying no fewer than eight times in one article. I should actually face criticism for not detailing the extent of her mendacity comprehensively enough.
Reeves’ lying has now reached the stage of the pathological. She lied about not raising taxes on working people during the election. She wrote those lies into the Labour manifesto. She repeated the lies after last year’s Budget, explicitly pledging not to come back in 2025 for more spending, taxes and borrowing.
She lied about the state of the public finances to justify breaking that pledge. She then lied about lying about the state of the public finances. And then on Tuesday she lied about the briefings that resulted from those lies.
Broken
The New Statesman – not traditionally the most fastidious transcriber of Right-wing talking points – this week reported a new major poll detailing how Labour is now the least-trusted party in Britain.
According to the magazine, ‘the Chancellor’s Budget measures appear to have played some role in the worrying results for Labour’, with the detailed figures revealing that 69 per cent of respondents said Labour had ‘broken their manifesto promises on tax’. Of 2024 Labour voters, half agreed with that assessment. Almost two-thirds of voters say that ‘tax rises in the November Budget were not justified’.
Think about that for a second. The Tories, post-Boris and Partygate. The Lib Dems post-tuition fees. Reform, who have just seen one of their former politicians jailed for being in the pay of a foreign power. The Greens, whose leader once claimed he could make a woman’s breasts grow with his mind.
Yet the voters now think it’s Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves who are the leading political purveyors of dishonesty and deceitfulness. And, as ever, the voters are right.
