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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...


One moral of the Budget is to beware of governments offering you incentives to buy a particular kind of car. On the advice of the then EU Transport...


After the frenzy of the Commons, comes the poring over the fine print. Rachel Reeves’s Budget is being studied across Westminster, following a...

Watch The Spectator panel discuss the autumn Budget tonight via livestream. Stephanie Flanders, head of economics and politics at Bloomberg will be...


True to form, Rachel Reeves’s autumn Budget didn’t land smoothly. The publication of the OBR report she was supposed to unveil during her...


It is genuinely astonishing that Rachel Reeves isn’t accompanied by the Benny Hill theme at all times. Her ability to harvest the fruit of...



To the House of Lords, where it transpires that two peers are to be suspended after they were deemed to have breached lobbying rules. Undercover...


Of all the things the public might think Prime Minister Keir Starmer should apologise for, a TikTok dance is probably not top of the list. Yet that...


As an American who respects the constitutional role and historical continuity of the British Crown, I view the recent congressional request to...


In politics, as in life, it helps to get your excuses in early. That presumably is why, ahead of tomorrow’s Budget, Keir Starmer has mounted a...
