Sorry placemats, I don’t agree. She is a poor politician.
It’s the budget of a lifetime because somehow she has to not break her manifesto promise, not raise tax on working people, and yet stick to her fiscal requirements. If she was a capable politician she would not have presented her budget as she did last year. She would have got her colleagues around the table to support her cuts, rather than assume she would get them and then belatedly pitch the hard line on welfare in Parliament which failed to deliver any cuts.
Gordon Brown’s fiscal genius was to design tests he knew he could meet before he met them, trumpet them loudly, and tell the market ahead of time. Those markets were calm. Reeves is nowhere near that level of political nous albeit in a more reactive world. She has deferred the budget to enable the bond market to calm down. That is probably not a bad move now. But why did she do it? Because the market reacts to the OBR, her fiscal promises, and instead of benefiting from them, she is actually being battered by her own devices and her previous unwise statements about a black hole in the government finances that now she has to fill.
She may be an excellent economist. But it’s a budget of a lifetime. We are close to public spending running to 100 percent of GDP. I will be interested to see what we get for that, and whether her budget decreases the rate the UK Government pays on its debt which is currently more than Liz Truss ever managed.
These are big problems. I am not convinced she has the political nous to navigate them.