Will there be a surprise in Rachel Reeves’s Budget?

Most chancellors pull a rabbit out of a hat during their Budget statements – something to delight their own MPs and leave the opposition feeling outmanoeuvred.

Such has been the atmosphere of doom and gloom generated by Rachel Reeves in advance of hers that there is a temptation to envisage her plonking a boiled bunny on the Commons despatch box and exclaiming: ‘It’s Halloween tomorrow, so grab a load of that!’

And yet Ms Reeves will surely at least attempt to conjure up the vista of some sunlit economic uplands after four months of exaggerated complaints about the financial inheritance passed down by the Tories.

Her marathon whinge, centred around her having identified an in-year financial ‘black hole’, has clearly been designed to excuse an impending raft of tax rises she spent the entire election promising would not be needed.