Welcome to my first Evening Blend . Unless there are earth-shattering events each Friday, my intention is to try to cut through the events of the week and say what really mattered over the past five days. This week, it was the Treasury’s relentless efforts to ‘roll the pitch’ for the Budget. But the frenetic pace of the briefings and leaks is such that you have to ask: what the blithering heck is Rachel Reeves up to?

The Chancellor gave a speech on Monday in which she explained that the parlous state she finds herself in was the fault of the Tories, Brexit, the pandemic, foreign wars and the like. She knows what the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will announce on Budget day, still 19 days away let us not forget, about how productivity declined in Britain over the past ten years,

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