UK Budget: Rachel Reeves should have dreaded today’s Budget – but punch-drunk Tories ensured it was a cakewalk

That was thanks to the Libor scheme, where fines were imposed on poorly behaved banks and the proceeds brought into wider circulation. On the eve of the Budget, his office called Scottish Conservative HQ to say he had a spare £5 million, was there anything up north that would benefit?

The only catch was we had to decide on something pretty much there and then. “What’s the swimming pool project Maurice Corry [a local Conservative councillor] keeps banging on about in Helensburgh?” asked one staffer on a whim. That’ll do.

By the next afternoon, in front of the whole country, Osborne had confirmed millions of pounds for a regeneration project in the town, delivering the pool and plenty more besides in the years that followed.

Months of planning, hundreds of staff, and billions of pounds go into the Budget – but sometimes for lucky recipients, it just comes down to a stroke of good fortune. We later joked that had Councillor Corry – a veteran, eccentric representative of the area – not randomly come up in conversation that morning, the cash would have gone elsewhere.

Labour’s wilderness years

I’m not privy to whether or not Labour enjoyed such silliness at the heart of their preparations this week, but there are some cross-party similarities with the Cameron-Osborne days.

For years, the Tories could pretty much announce what they liked, knowing the opposition was in such a pitiful state they would be unable to muster any proper scrutiny or impose accountability.

Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband and John McDonnell were never going to bring sleepless nights to a Chancellor of the Exchequer the night before the big day. In fact, in the years preceding Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, it was usually the far smaller SNP group who provided the sternest response.

Now it was Labour and Reeves’ turn to face a similarly weak opposition. Despite the difficulties the party has had in its opening months of government – winter fuel allowance cuts and sleaze scandals among them – the proceedings in Westminster were a walk in the park.

A bizarre goodbye

Ludicrously, the man answering the budget for the Conservatives was Rishi Sunak. Pleasant though he is, and of course a former Chancellor, there could hardly be a less appropriate adversary. He lost badly in July, with the scale of the defeat obvious for months in advance.

He said a tasteful goodbye when parliament returned in the late summer, and then offered yet another – albeit witty – farewell during Prime Minister’s Questions in the minutes leading up to the Budget.

Starmer even paid him a glowing tribute, rightly acknowledging his “decency”. So the optics, after all of this, of Sunak turning on his heels and coming back to the stage to respond to the Budget were utterly bizarre.

It underlined how inexcusably slow the Conservative process has been for selecting a new leader. It ought to have been done long ago, allowing a new chief to bring in and acclimatise a Shadow Chancellor. For them, responding to this budget could have been the beginning of a fightback.

Purest form of elitism

They could have gone in hard on the fact that this was the highest tax-rising Budget of modern times, imposing £40 billion in new levies for hardworking people and businesses. They could have hammered Reeves for the selling out of the North Sea oil and gas sector – complete madness when you consider it is Scotland’s one and only mega-economy.

A most compelling case could be made against the imposing of VAT on private schools, something that will hit Edinburgh particularly hard, and reaffirm that property prices – not school fees – remain the purest form of elitism when it comes to education.

And they could have made hay with the ridiculous divergence between what Labour said prior to the election and what they have done subsequently. Instead, yesterday’s man returned for a final heave in the limelight. It almost didn’t matter what Sunak said, the public had switched off.

Labour survives first big test

When it comes to politics, most people only pay attention to elections and Budgets. Millions tuning in across the UK would have asked: is that not the Tory guy who got pasted in the summer? The Conservatives’ failure to refresh the leadership means Labour have survived their first stiff test where they may otherwise have been forced to endure a major setback.

Whoever ends up as the Conservative leader, and whoever they pick as Shadow Chancellor, will be playing catch-up, and will need to wait until at least the spring before having an opportunity to impress the public with their economic credentials.

But the switching of identities wasn’t only on the part of the Tories. Much of the language used by Reeves could have been copied and pasted from Conservative scripts over recent years.

The Tories’ management of the economy was “the height of irresponsibility”, she said, adding they had “run out of road” and played “fast and loose with the public finances”. Instead, it would be Labour to bring an “end to short-termism”.

Feeble

On the opposing benches, former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt feebly shook his head and muttered back in disgruntlement, as so many of his deflated Labour predecessors had done in the decade before.

The watching Scottish nationalists, who have long complained that Labour and the Tories are two sides of the same coin, will feel vindicated at this swapping of costumes on display in parliament.

For the sake of accountability and effective democracy, the Conservatives cannot allow this cakewalk to happen ever again.

Adam Morris is a former head of media for the Scottish Conservatives