Lying Rachel finds her ‘fall guy’: OBR chief who exposed Chancellor’s lies QUITS over shambolic leak of Budget  – but he’s just being made a scapegoat to save her skin, insist Tories

OBR chief Richard Hughes resigned following last week’s budget leak; but the Conservative Party claimed he was sacked for exposing Rachel Reeves’ lies.

In a letter to the Chancellor and the House of Commons Treasury Committee on Monday, Mr Hughes said he took ‘full responsibility’ for Ms Reeves’ mistake.

He added that his resignation would help ‘the organization I have loved to lead for the last five years quickly recover from this regrettable event’.

It comes after Treasury secretary James Murray told MPs the Government would consider the ‘serious’ findings of the investigation into the incident.

Mr Murray said the incident was a ‘systemic’ failure, pointing to the conclusion that management should review security measures and that ‘market sensitive information’ had been disclosed.

But the Conservatives had warned that Mr Hughes should not be made a ‘scapegoat’ amid a separate row over Mr Reeves’ misrepresentation of figures given to him privately by the OBR.

Earlier, Sir Keir Starmer held a press conference to mock the watchdog’s ‘major error’ over the Budget leak and question the independent body’s decision.

The report into the accidental release of key documents, published this afternoon, acknowledged it was the ‘worst’ incident in the organisation’s 15-year history.

Extraordinarily, he also suggested that financial outlook documents, which essentially contained the entire budget, were mistakenly available online too early.

However, the assessment made clear that a technical glitch was behind the problem, not the fault of hackers or an official.

Last week Mr Hughes said he was ’embarrassed’ by the extraordinary leak and If he loses the trust of the chancellor and MPs he will resign.

Sir Keir Starmer had previously held a press conference to mock the watchdog’s ‘major error’ over the Budget leak and question the independent body’s decision.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch insisted Rachel Reeves should not make Mr Hughes ‘the man who failed because of his deceit and lies’

Mr Murray said: ‘Last Wednesday, before the Chancellor (Rachel Reeves) began making her Budget speech, the OBR published the full EFO online.

‘Let me be clear, this is a very serious breach of extremely sensitive information.

‘This is a fundamental breach of the OBR’s responsibility. This is disrespectful to Parliament and should never have happened.’

The OBR chief’s departure risks spooking markets after the Budget. It would also be a danger to Downing Street if Mr Hughes spoke freely about the Budget process.

As well as the leak, tensions are also rising as the Treasury Department reveals explosive details about when it will step in on the OBR. He told Ms Reeves there was no gap in public finances.

This fueled widespread anger that he had lied about looming problems to mollify Britons about huge tax increases.

The leak report blames a technical glitch that made the URL unexpectedly available rather than hacking, and suggests it wasn’t just because authorities accidentally put the material online too soon.

However, the assessment noted that the same problem existed before and uncovered evidence that documents may have been accessed prematurely during the last Budget.

This raises questions about whether people can profit from early knowledge of what’s in the announcements.

A unique IP address made 32 attempts to retrieve the document from the web address before the document was published; This showed that the user was expecting the error.

It was later downloaded 43 times between 11.41am and 12.07pm and the team finally managed to take it offline.

Sir Keir said earlier today: ‘I will not suggest that what happened last week, namely the publication of the full Budget before the Chancellor stood up, was anything other than a serious mistake.

‘This was market sensitive information. This was a great disrespect to parliament. This is a serious mistake, there is an ongoing investigation.

‘But as for the OBR, I am very supportive of the OBR for the reasons I have already stated; ‘It’s vital to stability, it’s vitally important and it’s an integral part of our fiscal rules, which I’ve said many times are stringent.’

Sir Keir also expressed disappointment with the OBR’s decision to now carry out a long-term efficiency review; however, this impact was more than offset by other forecast changes.

“I’m not angry about the efficiency review,” the Prime Minister said.

‘It’s a good thing that these types of reviews are done from time to time. I am confused.

‘I think doing this at the end of the last government and before we start might be a good point to do an efficiency review so we know exactly what we’re up against.

‘To do this for 15, 16 months in government, it had to be done sometime, but to pay the price for the failure of the last government – obviously it was the nature of the beast for the last 16 months, but there was a particular emphasis on that in this exercise.

‘I’m not angry, I’m just baffled as to why this hasn’t been done at the end of the government and not now, but I don’t think these reviews are important etc. I’m not saying.’

Ms Reeves was left squirming when confronted with details of how the government had raised problems on its books in interviews yesterday, despite the OBR informing her they were actually predicting a small surplus.

The timeline was outlined in a letter the independent body sent to MPs and published on Friday.

This sparked a rare public reaction from the Treasury, which said it had been assured that such information would ‘generally’ not be made public in the future.

Asked yesterday about the OBR chief’s fate, Ms Reeves said: ‘Look, there’s no one who supports the Office of Budget Responsibility more than me.

‘I reappointed Richard Hughes in the summer to strengthen the powers of the OBR…

‘Obviously he was serious. This was clearly a serious breach of protocol.’

Following the publication of the OBR letter on Friday, a Treasury spokesman said: ‘We will not go into the OBR’s processes or speculate about how this relates to internal decision-making in creating the Budget, but the Chancellor has made his choices to cut living costs, shorten hospital waiting lists and provide double headroom to reduce the cost of our debt.

‘We take budget security extremely seriously and believe it is important to maintain a dedicated space for Treasury-OBR policy and forecast discussions, so we welcome the OBR’s confirmation that this will not become regular practice.’

Ms Reeves was left writhing when confronted with details of how the government had raised problems on its books in interviews yesterday, even after she was informed that the OBR had in fact estimated a small surplus.