Who’ll be blamed for Rachel Reeves’s tax hikes?

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt entered Downing Street with one mission: to clean up the public finances after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget debacle. They posed as the fiscally credible option. All bills would need to be covered, even if the tax burden had to rise. If the Tories were to lose power for being disciplined and truthful, then so be it.

Rachel Reeves has sought to demolish their responsible reputation in her first weeks as Chancellor by announcing that she has discovered a £21.9 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances this year. This was not an accounting error, according to Reeves, but a cover-up carried out ‘knowingly and deliberately’ by the Tories, thereby forcing her hand to cut spending and, soon, raise taxes. ‘He lied,’ Reeves said of Hunt, her predecessor, the day after she presented her audit to parliament.