Why, in my judgement, Reeves was misleading on one specific point

You may have seen the flurry of headlines over the weekend where Chancellor Rachel Reeves was accused of lying and misleading you ahead of the Budget last week.

It is my job to explain this on your behalf carefully and precisely, after a careful review of the facts.

In my view, we were misled about a particular element in what the Chancellor and the Treasury told us ahead of the Budget.

Let’s go through this step by step. On Tuesday, November 4, the chancellor made an appeal. Extraordinary press conference before the budget.

This was a new and voluntary event; Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Reeves called this press conference because he wanted to set the stage for a big budget full of difficult choices.

And let’s be clear: much of what we heard in the chancellor’s breakfast speech that morning, almost four weeks ago, set the stage for what was to come.

He made it clear that huge tax increases were coming, and he was right. He spoke about the importance to him of measures to cover living expenses, and these were included in his budget last week.

He expressed a desire to be given more leeway in spreadsheets against self-imposed financial rules (so-called “earnings margin”). It did this, as it did to maintain long-term investment spending.

Most importantly, he also talked about productivity, which is a measure of the economy’s output per hour worked. The Office for Budget Responsibility, a forecaster and watchdog, was expected to revise its productivity growth forecast downwards.

This decision by the OBR had major effects on Reeves; it affected the numbers, the spreadsheets, and therefore the calculations and compromises he had to make. Isolation has undoubtedly made things harder for him.

In other words, nothing he said at that press conference was wrong.

But – and this is the key – we now know that he knew something he didn’t share with us that morning; That is, tax revenues were much better than expected and more than offset the decline in productivity growth.

The OBR has since made this very clear and set out a timetable for what it will tell the Treasury; This includes the fact that the chancellor knew the tax revenue data during the press conference.

In fact, 10 days later, the Treasury chose to voluntarily state this fact regarding tax revenues. Financial Times reported that income tax rates will not change in the budgetand markets wondered how the numbers would increase next.

This was followed by a briefing to me and others that was intended to be accurate and reassuring to these markets; This meant saying tax revenues were much stronger than we expected, so it was okay.

So, at the press conference a month ago, the chancellor volunteered to share some information he kept confidential, but also chose not to share some other information he kept confidential; However, he chose to share his move 10 days later when he decided it was politically expedient.

I must say that he suggested that it was unfair to say that the Treasury was misleading because the chancellor was facing a huge gap in his spreadsheet at the time of the press conference, given the buffer zone or headroom he wanted to create and the policy choices he wanted to make.

The numbers also support this.

And the OBR could have said that the chancellor was right to be conservative and cautious, or that he should have based his plans on early versions of the watchdog’s forecasts because that would have been the right thing to do. OBR boss Richard Hughes will answer questions from MPs on the Treasury Committee on Tuesday morning.

But the words that day left an impression that we would later discover was at odds with the facts the Chancellor knew at the time.