Have Labour’s budget leaks breached the ministerial code?

Well, well, well. Budget announcements are meant to be made in the House of Commons chamber – yet despite all Sir Keir Starmer’s talk of ‘grown up politics’, his Labour government has opted to trail a number of announcements in advance of Rachel Reeves’s big speech. As Mr S wrote on Monday, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle made a furious intervention to scold the Chancellor over the leaks, raging that announcements should have been made ‘in the first instance in this house and not to the world’s media’. That’s them told…

Now the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Laura Trott, has used an urgent question to further bash the lefty lot over the matter. Laying Starmer’s recent dramas out in full, the Tory MP remarked: This government seems to be taking lessons from the worst bits of our record. And not just ours – the last Labour government, too.’ Going on, Trott insisted:

It’s like the greatest hits of government mistakes being replayed in just 100 days.