From the outside, the run-up to Rachel Reeves’s announcement has looked chaotic, and many see the future of the chancellor and PM in the balance
Every budget could be described, to a greater or lesser extent, as a high-stakes moment. Things can easily go badly wrong, as Gordon Brown discovered when he abolished the 10p tax rate in 2007, or George Osborne when his 2012 ‘omnishambles’ budget fell apart over pasties, and especially Kwasi Kwarteng, whose disastrous mini-budget of 2022 sent the Conservatives spiralling towards electoral defeat.
Rachel Reeves appears to have come perilously close to the turmoil of previous budgets, and that’s before she has even delivered it.
Veterans of the Blair government who have watched the chancellor at work behind the scenes say she has a calm, methodical approach, which compares favourably with the chaos that surrounded Brown in the buildup to his budgets, as KitKat wrappers and pages of speech drafts were strewn around the floor of No 11.
Yet to the world outside, the run-up to this difficult second Labour budget has looked utterly chaotic. A plethora of policies has been floated, denied, debated and ditched over the long buildup to next Wednesday.
