This time it’s Tory leader Kemi Badenoch making the charge. Yesterday she blasted the Chancellor for misrepresenting budget forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, saying: “She sold her ‘Benefits Street’ Budget on a lie.” She even demanded Reeves’s resignation, adding: “Honesty matters... she has to go.”

Honesty does matter. Especially when you’re in charge of the nation’s finances and you’re deliberately talking down the UK economy, risking a bond market wobble, just to play political games.

Badenoch has her own motives, of course, so it’s worth hearing what independent economist Paul Johnson, former director of the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, has to say.

He told The Times that Reeves’s November briefing, when she warned of income tax hikes, “probably was misle

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