With hindsight, Rachel Reeves’s first Budget in October last year looks even worse than it did at the time. It wasn’t exactly cheered to the rafters then, even by Labour’s own mass of backbenchers, but a year on it has become clear that those early decisions have damaged the country’s economic performance and blighted Reeves’s time in the Treasury.

The Chancellor has been somewhat unlucky, to be fair, but she made three crucial errors in the October Budget. First, she did not give herself enough slack if the economy took a turn for the worse. Second, she forgot that economics is not only about numbers but also about mood. Third, she failed to abide by the dictum attributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the comptroller general of finances of Louis XIV: ‘The art of taxation consists of so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.’ Here are some thoughts about each of those errors.

On the first, the Reeves gave herself only £9.9 billion of headroom after the last Budget – virtually nothing. (For context, Britain’s GDP was £2,884 billion in cash terms in 2024.) As it turned out,........

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