During his 14 years as head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), perhaps Britain’s most prestigious economic think-tank, Paul Johnson ran the rule over dozens of tax-and-spend interventions from multiple different chancellors.

He is now safely out of the Westminster fray, as provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford – but watching on from afar, he says this year’s Budget has been messier than ever .

“It clearly has been unusually chaotic,” he tells The i Paper from his Oxford office. “In many respects. First, the speculation – as far as one can tell, some of it, informed by Treasury sources – started incredibly early, right back in July. There’s been speculation about an extraordinarily large number of potential changes. And of course, we have the apparent U-turn on the U-turn i

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