It is a truth universally acknowledged in the corridors of Westminster that when a Labour Chancellor discovers a fiscal black hole large enough to swallow the GDP of a modest Balkan republic, the correct response is not to fill it but to stand beside it, point downwards with theatrical alarm, and cry “Look what the last lot did!” before tipping in another twenty-six billion pounds of everyone else’s money. Rachel Reeves, our new Master of the Exchequer, has taken this ancient art to previously unscaled heights of virtuosity. One almost wants to stand and applaud, were it not for the fact that one’s wallet is already lying winded on the floor.
The alleged abyss, you will recall, was £22 billion deep—give or take the odd hundred million, a sum so trifling in Whitehall that it is practically loose change. To plug this imaginary void the Chancellor imposed tax rises of £26 billion, a margin of error so generous it could only be the work of a woman who once edited the chess column of the Guardian and therefore understands that sometimes one must sacrifice a pawn, or indeed an entire middle class, to achieve checkmate. Yet here comes the delicious twist, the moment at which the whole solemn edifice begins to wobble like a jelly on a trampoline. Documents from the Office for Budget Responsibility—those stern monks who guard the nation’s abacus—reveal that by October 2025 the government already enjoyed £4.2 billion of fiscal headroom. Headroom! The very word has a buoyant, almost frivolous ring to it, like the spare bedroom one keeps for visiting aunts who never actually visit.
Four point two billion in the kitty, and still the cry went up that the safe was bare. One is reminded of the great music-hall routine in which the comedian discovers a ten-shilling note in his pocket and immediately declares bankruptcy on the grounds that he once lost a fiver in 1947. Naturally, questions have been asked. An ethics probe has been launched, which in modern Britain means that a committee of the suitably grave will meet for several years, consume several hundredweight of custard creams, and finally conclude that nobody can be held responsible because the dog ate the minutes. Market-abuse allegations flutter in the air like confetti at a wedding nobody wanted to attend. And still the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer—looking, as ever, like a man who has just been told the Wi-Fi password is “BeSureToDrinkYourOvaltine”—insists that everything is proceeding exactly according to plan. The plan, one presumes, being to govern as though the electorate were a rather slow child who can be placated with a lollipop made of broken promises.
Meanwhile, in the wings, Ed Miliband—last seen attempting to power the national grid with the kinetic energy of his own moral superiority—hovers like a moth near the flame of Net Zero. Winter fuel payments have been removed from pensioners who now face the choice between heating and eating, a dilemma resolved, one suspects, by eating the cat and burning the sofa. All this, we are told, is necessary to save the planet, which is generous of us considering the planet has survived ice ages, meteor strikes and the entire discography of Phil Collins without requiring a single means-tested pensioner to sit in the dark. True to form, the media predicts panic in the parliamentary Labour Party, resignations, early elections, and the return of the Tories—presumably wearing false noses and speaking in regional accents so that nobody recognises them. One detects in his prose the faint, acrid scent of a man who has just watched his winter fuel allowance disappear into the same black hole that wasn’t there.
And perhaps he has a point. When a government can discover £4.2 billion of headroom and still impose £26 billion of tax rises with a straight face, one begins to suspect that arithmetic is no longer the constraining factor in British politics. The constraining factor is imagination, and Labour’s imagination currently runs to only one scenario: there is never enough money, except, of course, for the consultants who advised them that there wasn’t enough money, and who are now billing by the hour to investigate why nobody noticed there was. In the end, the £22 billion black hole turns out to have been less a fiscal catastrophe than a conjuring trick—a hole so artfully contrived that it vanished the moment anyone shone a torch into it.
One is left with the melancholy reflection that, in the great theatre of British governance, the audience is no longer asked merely to suspend disbelief. We are now required to suspend belief itself, and to do it cheerfully, before being handed the bill for the magician’s champagne.