Reeves’s Budget was like the office whip-round nobody could quite avoid

Rachel Reeves entered the Commons on a job-saving mission, starting with her own. The Autumn Budget is one of the showbiz events of the Westminster year – a mixture of mojo, magic accounting and the undodgeable trade-offs of tax, spending and borrowing.

It was also a day when she had a personal ghost to exorcise – the memory of her personal meltdown this summer, as her welfare reform plans were eviscerated by Labour backbenchers and her misery was on display. One advantage beckoned today. Someone in SW1 was having a worse Wednesday than she was: namely Richard Hughes, the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), whose team had managed to leak the Budget an hour before delivery, in an as-yet unwritten episode of The Thick of It.

Reeves was wearing one of those tie-neck blouses only ever seen in shops for female City board members, her hair and makeup also setting her up for battle mode. As a comeback vibe, it was not as exciting as her supporters had hoped, but not as shaky as her detractors had predicted either. She had a couple of zingers aimed at Nigel Farage and the Conservatives but, still, no one ever died of dramatic overexcitement listening to The Rachel Show.

The OBR blunder, however, offered the chance to do what the chancellor does well, which is to look and sound cross in the way Labour has of permanent annoyance at other people’s frailties while unaware of its own. The leak was “deeply disappointing” and a “serious error”, she rapped. Thank goodness nothing ever goes wrong in the leaking of muddled messaging from No 11.

Anyway, Reeves had spent weeks leaking her own budget to avoid a hard landing in the markets. It took a while until we got to the gristle among the meat on that “smorgasbord” of budget changes: growth is stuttering, inflation is stubborn and £26bn has just been added to the tax pile in outright breach of Reeves’ pledge that she would not be “back for more” this year.

Rachel-speak is now a language of evasion and inventive obfuscation. Her line that everyone would “make a contribution” to national wellbeing sounded like one of those office leaving do whip-rounds no one really wants, but few get out of either. Taxes on savings and pension contributions will rise. All chancellors have their own tricks of the light they apply to bad news. Reeves’s is to sound as if unpleasant hits are really affecting someone else, whom none of us knows. We skated lightly over the large number of professional “working people” who would be stumping up. The implication was that you would have to be oligarchically wealthy to feel the sting, rather than an investor, business owner or higher earner.

For a leadership that has had a lot of property tax headaches of late, Reeves lingered on the uprating of levies on homes worth over £5m. “You can probably afford it,” she quipped when a hollering Tory objected.

A politician who has railed against being “mansplained” to is turning out to be a faithful daughter of the Church of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship and political economy theory. The methodology is clear: choose a cut-off point in the income distribution and hit the higher chunk of it. Over £50k a year is enough to catapult earners into the tax rise zone. You could feel the Treasury’s AI models whizzing across the calculations. It sounds sensible enough until you look at individual quirks, circumstances and unintended consequences. “Fairness” was the word reeled out when the specifics were too painful to dwell on. There was a hole around the growth ideas in this Budget recipe that might give rise to the idea that the Starmer-Reeves kitchen is out of ingredients on that.

Children are a soft spot with Labour MPs, and so it was that, with the zeal of a 19th-century reformer, Reeves set out a redemptionist case for removal of the two-child benefit cap that had been introduced by the Tories. It would take a churl or just someone with a memory to point out that Reeves did not want to remove the cap so fast or so wholly and that she had resisted doing so until after the welfare bill fiasco. Reeves, who usually speaks in unmemorable sentences, went full tabloid: “It’s the kids who paid the price”.

The cost of £3bn also showed us that Reeves sees her budget as a moment of reconnection to a party that has become febrile and frustrated with its swithering leadership. Put bluntly, it was her bid to superglue herself into the wavering Labour balloon, alongside Keir Starmer. But the headwinds are still strong and the combination of taxes with more borrowing than she dwelt on is the burden she will now drag throughout her chancellorship.

Kemi Badenoch, lambasting Reeves’s complaints about ”mansplaining”, doled out an unsisterly barracking. Tories are banking on harrying the chancellor as the cost is counted by individuals and businesses, aka “those with the broadest shoulders”. A Tory being rude about her budget! As Reeves sweetly reminded Badenoch of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s Budget nearly sinking the country, her eyes burned with defiance – this Budget is going to be a festival of mutual womansplaining across the lines.

In the lengthy round-up of interviews, Reeves has told us she is going to be back for more budgets in the years ahead. But she now heads the country’s public finances in the single biggest tax-raising parliament in memory. Today, she styled it out and fought to keep the keys to No 11. It’s still far from certain that this is a long-stay incumbency.

Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and co-host of the ‘Politics at Sam and Anne’s’ podcast