Welcome to the half-real, half-fantasy world that is ‘the day after the budget’ | John Crace

This is the day when politicians and amateur commentators talk more doggybollox than on any other day of the year

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Neither actually. It’s a bizarre hybrid, an altered hallucinogenic universe. Where up is down and down is up. Everything always slightly out of reach.

A world otherwise known as “the day after the budget”. A day when politicians and amateur commentators are guaranteed to talk more doggybollox than on any other day of the year. A day when everyone gets their 15 minutes of shame.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the Today presenter in possession of the 8.10 slot with the chancellor on this most auspicious of days is the person who not so secretly believes that they are actually far better qualified to be running the economy than the person who lives at No 11.

This year that presenter was Nick Robinson. Amol Rajan must have been gutted to miss out. He, also, is not short of the self-belief there is no job he can’t do better than anyone else. Perhaps next year the BBC will run a gameshow called So You Think You Could Be Chancellor? for all its Today presenters. The winner gets to be interviewed by the runner-up on the day after the night before. Nick and Amol go head-to-head to save the country. Cut out the middle woman.

You would have thought that Rachel Reeves must have got something right. It’s not many chancellors who get a guarded thumbs up from the left wing of the Labour party and the financial markets. That might even be a fiscal first. OK, so all the rightwing politicians and media had wasted no time in trashing the budget as the worst in living memory, but they were always going to say that. Don’t forget that these were the same politicians and commentators who had rushed to praise Liz Truss.

To his credit, Nick Robinson did try to keep an open mind. Sort of. Though it’s hard having to bite your lip when you know you could have done so much better. But this wasn’t about him. Not much, anyway. He began with the question of trust. Why should anyone believe her when she had said she wouldn’t be raising income tax? A more than fair question. And one with no real answer.

Reeves initially tried to pretend that freezing thresholds didn’t really count as a tax rise, even though it meant more people paying more in tax. Rather, it was a special loophole available to all chancellors: the broken promise that didn’t count as a broken promise because nobody ever expected you to keep it. A bit like Boris Johnson swearing to be faithful.

And Rachel wanted us to know that, though these were all her choices, nothing was really her fault. She had been constrained by the figures of the Office for Budget Responsibility and it was working on Tory productivity figures, which were far worse than Labour productivity figures.

Things got stickier when Nick asked Reeves to apologise. A category error. Because no politician ever apologises for anything. Other than occasionally for some offence that a deluded person may have taken. And no chancellor is going to apologise for a budget that is less than 24 hours old. This had all been fair and necessary – £6bn for more spending and £20bn fiscal headroom. There would be no coming back for more in a year’s time. I think we had heard that one before. But here’s hoping.

Robinson also sounded doubtful about lifting the two-child benefit cap. Perhaps he worries about the wrong kind of families getting the money. Rachel tried to put him right. She was lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty and most families were in work. Hard to argue with that. Only Reeves herself had initially been unwilling to lift the cap and was only forced into a U-turn by a revolt of her own backbenchers. Still, better a sinner that repenteth and all that.

We ended with Rachel insisting she would prove the forecasters wrong. She was the Bringer of Growth. There were loads of things that had been too small for the OBR to score but that would miraculously coalesce to supercharge the economy. Things were going to get better. But for now she just wanted a lie down.

Earlier in the programme, Robinson had spared 10 minutes for the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride: someone for whom opposition has only fuelled his self-delusion. In his own mind he has upped a gear from someone decidedly third-rate to someone almost second-rate. The less likely he is to inflict any damage the more effective he imagines himself to be.

This was definitely the worst budget in the history of the world, said The Melster. Nick tried to put him right: it was the worst budget since the last budget. That’s how these things worked. And before Mel got any ideas, Nick wanted to remind him that he was also spectacularly useless. He was the work and pensions minister who had made record increases to welfare spending. And the Tories also had broken their election promises. Mel shuffled uneasily. Tory tax rises were OK, he mumbled. Labour ones weren’t.

For more impartial reporting on the budget we had to rely – as ever – on the Institute for Fiscal Studies briefing. Helen Miller brought out her scorecard. There were some bits that were good, others less so. The real thing to remember was that no party had a firm grasp of how to manage tax reform. The politics always got in the way. And she also wondered how much of this budget would actually happen, given the fact that the tax rises and spending cuts were timed to kick in just before the next election.

So it could all just have been a fiction. A budget designed to look like a budget merely because it was that time of year. It made you wonder why we had bothered.