The FTSE fall will upset Rachel Reeves’s October Budget

For a while it looked as if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were going to be lucky: they had walked into an economic recovery. The anaemic growth and market turmoil of the past few years – which Labour liked to blame entirely on ‘Tory chaos’ and absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic or energy crisis which followed the invasion of Ukraine – were going to be replaced by a period of stability and prosperity. Some governments are fortunate in their timing: Tony Blair walked into a decade of non-inflationary growth thanks to globalisation and the emergence of China as a major economy.

Most popular

Patrick O’Flynn

Keir Starmer is dangerously out of touch

Hardeep Singh

What’s the real reason Labour is reluctant to hold a grooming gangs inquiry?

Gareth Roberts

The grooming gang scandal needs to change our entire worldview

But Starmer, it now looks, will not be so lucky.