There were times – quite a few of them in the past few months – when people speculated that Rachel Reeves would not survive as chancellor into the winter.
It has been an especially bruising year for the Chancellor of the Exchequer – from the tears in the House of Commons to the various U-turns over economic policy that left a black hole in her fiscal plans.
So there was more than a little symbolism to the fact that she took to the stage today and dominated the first full day of Labour Party Conference.
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Her performance was confident – more confident than many had expected. Relatively light on brand new economic policy, her speech is perhaps better described as a sort of highlights reel of Labour’s “best bits” in office so far: more money for investment, more cash for schools, more funding for the NHS as well as rescues for British Steel and, just recently, Jaguar Land Rover.
Her problem, however, is that this tightly-controlled speech, part of a tightly-controlled conference, is the starting gun for something Ms Reeves has far less control over: the long roller coaster towards the next budget.
Later this week, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will deliver its first estimate to the Treasury of the projected state of the public finances in the coming years. While the OBR is a public body, it generates its own forecasts in secrecy, so while the Treasury has a team of economists trying to second-guess the OBR, no one in Downing Street is entirely sure where it will end up.
That estimate (which will be chopped and…
