After all the mayhem, the pre-budget briefings and Treasury hysteria about OBR growth downgrades, it turns out that if the chancellor had done precisely zilch yesterday, she would have almost met her main fiscal target, to generate a surplus on day-to-day spending. The miss would have been a rounding error £2bn. In fact, without her humiliating welfare u-turns - on disability benefit reforms and means testing the winter fuel payment - she would have hit that target by a slim £4.4bn. In other words the funding benefits of the £44bn of tax rises in last year’s budget were not wiped out by the Office for Budget Responsibility’s decision to downgrade its productivity and growth forecasts - for all the Chancellor’s very public frustration with that downgrade. Her fuss over the downgrade - which did happen, and which added £16bn to the deficit five year’s hence - was a red herring, a canard, a conjuror’s “look over there, not at what am I actually doing.” Because the OBR simultaneously calculated that the yield from existing taxes would fill that productivity induced hole almost twice over! So this was in no sense a fiscal and economic crisis budget. Her £26bn of tax rises were the Chancellor’s choice, not a necessity. For her personally and for her prime minister however there was a political crisis. Because they feared they were losing the confidence of Labour MPs and could lose the confidence of investors. So pretty much every penny of that £26bn in higher taxes had a political purpose - to placate MPs who wanted Starmer’s government to show more zeal in helping families on the lowest earnings, to cut energy, prescription and rail bills, and to prove to investors they are not red Liz-Trusses by adding £12bn to the headroom or buffer against future shocks. The big unanswered political question is whether placating Labour MPs and the mega investors is also addressing the nation’s priorities. On that hinges how Labour will perform in those important May elections, and whether the eviction of Reeves and Starmer is cancelled or merely delayed.