Rachel Reeves and Trevor Phillips on Sky News.

Rachel Reeves has been forced to deny lying to the country about the state of the public finances as she clashed with Trevor Phillips on Sky News.

Treasury officials repeatedly suggested in the run-up to the Budget that there was a black hole of up to £30bn in the government’s sums.

Reeves herself even called an emergency Downing Street press conference at which she painted a gloomy picture of the state of the economy and warned voters their taxes would need to go up.

But figures released by the

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