There is a growing stench around the Treasury, and it’s not the usual Westminster incompetence. Something far worse has emerged in the past week: Rachel Reeves misled the country — knowingly — and Keir Starmer backed her to the hilt. That is not a political gaffe. That is a breach of public trust. The facts are now undeniable. The Office for Budget Responsibility told the Chancellor on 31 October that the public finances no longer had a shortfall. No black hole. No fiscal meltdown. No crisis demanding sweeping tax rises.

Yet on 4 November, Reeves stood at a Downing Street podium and delivered the opposite story — a grim sermon about a £20 billion gap that had to be filled at once. And Starmer, fully aware of the truth, insisted he was “happy” with her speech. This was not miscommunication. It was orchestration.

Reeves did not simply paint a gloomy picture — she took a wrecking ball to market confidence. When a Chancellor tells the world the nation’s finances are cratering, investors pay attention. Capital retreats. Yields rise. Sterling wobbles. That is the cost of pessimistic propaganda. And Britain is paying it.

So we must ask the uncomfortable questions: Why deliberately talk the economy down when the underlying numbers had improved? Why invent a hole when the OBR had already confirmed a surplus?

One explanation is ideological. A growing number of observers — including level-headed Labour backbenchers — believe that the Fabian technocrats now running the government want a crisis narrative to justify radical change.

Drive the economy over the cliff edge, then fabricate the need for an “emergency” budget. In that fog, almost anything can be pushed through: tax hikes, wealth raids, sweeping intervention. The Fabian dream, wrapped in the language of fiscal necessity.

But perhaps that hypothesis gives Starmer and Reeves too much intellectual credit. What we have seen so far does not resemble grand strategy — it resembles amateur hour. A Chancellor out of her depth, clinging to the only story she knows: paint it bleak, raise taxes, blame the last government.

A Prime Minister with the spine of wet cardboard, nodding along because dissent might upset the focus groups. Their joint leadership has all the strategic coherence of a weather vane.

Regardless of motive, the political fallout is volcanic. Labour MPs are breaking ranks in open revolt. One backbencher described this as “the worst Labour Government in recorded history.” Another said bluntly that it’s “hard to see how they come back from it.”

When your MPs are speaking like pundits on Sunday politics shows, you know the ship is holed below the waterline. And looming over everything is the Budget leak debacle.

The OBR accidentally published its official forecasts almost an hour early. A humiliating apology followed. An investigation was launched. The OBR chairman, Richard Hughes, publicly declared he would resign if he lost the Chancellor’s confidence — a sentence no independent watchdog chief should ever have to utter.

And yet Reeves insists she has “huge respect” for the OBR while simultaneously refusing to back its leadership. Then came the Sunday broadcast round. Reeves denied lying — of course she did — and blamed the chaos on a breach of protocol.

She even suggested she’ll receive a report that will clarify everything. Downing Street, meanwhile, says Starmer remains “happy” with her performance. It is as if the entire government has retreated into a bunker and is hoping the public doesn’t notice the crater outside.

But the public has noticed. Britain cannot afford a government that treats economic truth as a disposable political prop. Confidence is not something you can rebuild with a press release. Once shredded, it takes years to repair.

Reeves and Starmer have shown us, time and again, that they are willing to mislead the public, rattle the markets, and cling to fiction when caught.

The damage they are currently causing will be felt for years to come.

That will be their legacy.