In the run-up to Budgets and fiscal statements, chancellors always face a barrage of helpful advice from all sides, as though the answers that have eluded them can be found down the back of the Treasury sofa. This is as it should be – politics is not so much a spectator sport as a backseat driving contest – and most of it can be ignored. But the advice on offer from the opposition party is always worth paying attention to, even if it’s unlikely to provide Rachel Reeves any last-minute ideas for untangling herself from the mess her fiscal rules have got her into.
It is notable that those fiscal rules – Reeves’s self-imposed straitjacket not to increase borrowing, which many Labour MPs wish she could be a bit more flexible on – didn’t get a mention in Jeremy Hunt’s big what-I-would-do-if-I-were-still-chancellor column in the Sunday Times last weekend. Instead, Hunt has miraculously solved the headache that is the UK economy with a raft of policies seemingly so straightforward one wonders why he and Rishi Sunak ever struggled. (Hunt’s pre-emptive defence is that he has more time to think in opposition.)
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