Ever since bond vigilantes around the world decided it was time to offload their holdings in sovereign debt, Westminster has assumed that tax rises are inevitable. It makes sense. Yields have soared, the market has priced in multiple interest rate hikes and earlier this week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that the government has overshot its borrowing forecasts.

There are 23 Bloomberg Terminals across HMT, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and other agencies and their users will have been poring over them over the last couple of weeks to turn market reality into fiscal forecasts. We’ve been attempting the same for Reality Check and the results are pretty clear: at least £10 billion wiped off the Chancellor’s headroom against his main fiscal rule.

That’s not only led Burnham and Healey to turn gloomy and warn challenges lie ahead but has also led to incredible briefings that they were not aware of how bad Britain’s books were looking before they hopped on the West Coast main line to London. We can only hope that........

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