Sunak has been pressing Starmer at PMQs on two specific Labour commitments: 1) not raising National Insurance, and 2) not fiddling with debt rules. Both of which are expected at the Budget…

Starmer dodged the question of debt-metric tweaking twice and attacked Sunak instead:

“This is literally the man who was in charge of the economy. For 14 years they crashed the economy and what did what did they leave? A £22 billion pound black hole…”

Reeves last year specifically ruled out changing the Tory government’s latest debt metric:

“I’m not going to try to fiddle the figures or make something different to get better results. We will use the same models the government uses.”

Yesterday Reeves told Cabinet that she was pressing ahead with changing the metric to allow borrowing of anything from £10 billion to £60 billion extra. Typical Brownite skullduggery could include counting state assets like roads, schools, and hospitals against debt, or excluding borrowing for “public institutions” and losses from the Bank of England from the calculation altogether. Reeves was looking worried as Starmer buried another of her pledges…