The Chancellor had been speaking for about five minutes when it dawned on me that she wasn’t going to say anything interesting. By the time she got to discussing the finer points of Southport’s pier and Kirkcaldy’s high street, I’d moved on to other things.

That’s not to say that the Spending Review wasn’t interesting, or that it didn’t matter, it’s just that Rachel Reeves used her speech in the Commons to rattle off not much more than a loose collection of local press releases with no intention of getting into the details.

As Paul Johnson of the IFS said, “The Chancellor’s speech was full of numbers, few of........

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