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The Spectator
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Numerous civil servants have recalled their first encounter with Labour ministers following their election victory last year. After the new rulers...

After a needlessly long run-up, Budget day is finally here. Investors, bond traders and house builders are breathing a collective sigh of relief –...


It’s traditional to describe Budgets as a political gamble. Rachel Reeves is actually making two bets. First, that voters can be persuaded to see...


Sitting beneath the looming darkness of the unfinished ceiling of Westminster Cathedral, I found myself praying. I didn’t even know why, but I was...

For the past 30 years Robin Oakley has taken you through the front door of the horse-racing world and kept you in the best of company. There’s not...


‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. So goes the famous Horace Walpole quote about William Kent, the 18th-century landscape...

Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after Jim Callaghan’s government had lost a...


My friend Allan Lamb calls me a ‘cricket tragic’, a back-handed compliment from a former English international cricketer. So the prospect of flying...


If the leaks are correct, Rachel Reeves will use today’s Budget to abolish the two-child benefit cap. Another £3.4 billion a year will flow to...


In her Budget speech today, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have four goals. Two political – keeping her own job and keeping Keir Starmer in his as...

Kemi Badenoch had a head-start in preparing her response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget after this morning’s OBR leak. It was an opportunity she made...


Kemi Badenoch has labelled the Budget a ‘total humiliation’ after Rachel Reeves’s big announcement was derailed by an Office for Budget...

Kemi Badenoch had two chances to attack the government today: first at Prime Minister’s Questions, and then again in response to the Budget. The...


It has lots of original features. It is close to good schools, and with a few cans of Farrow & Ball it will make the perfect family home. The...


What we have seen today is unprecedented. The entire list of Budget measures announced by Rachel Reeves – along with their costings and economic...


While Westminster is consumed by the fallout from the Budget, I can reveal there is another major headache on the horizon for Keir Starmer – a new...
