A make-or-break budget: inside the Treasury before Labour’s crucial day

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 balanceEvery 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. Continue reading…