Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have to learn that communication is not about massaging the numbers, it’s about winning hearts and minds - David Behrens

It was like watching a hapless village hall treasurer thrashing about for fundraising ideas. A bun sale, a tombola, a tax on the elderly: they’re all much the same when you lack the courage of your convictions and the committee is squabbling behind your back.

Those disagreements on the back benches went to the core of traditional Labour values which take no account of the fact that hitting workers, employers and those who contribute to the economy, while rewarding those who do not, doesn’t make Britain fairer; it only makes it angrier.

Budgets used to be here-today-and-gone-tomorrow events. Beer up tuppence, petrol up five bob, no change on VAT and an hour of argy-bargy in the Commons before we all forgot about it and moved on.

Not this time. The Chancellor had called a press conference weeks in advance to signal that she could no longer hold the line against raising taxes. Then she backtracked.

Each new leak fed into a relentless, negative news cycle that came back to bite her again and again. The front pages were awash with warnings of dire consequences – many contradicting each other – about the effect on jobs, benefits, the old, the young and everyone in between.

The final irony was that when she did finally get to her feet, the Office of Budget Irresponsibility had beaten her to the punch because some clown in the IT department had published the details online two hours too soon. If ever you needed proof that civil servants don’t know a laptop from a lollipop, here it was.

It was the Chancellor’s job to weigh the warnings against Labour’s strategy for growth and social cohesion but therein lay the problem. It has no grand scheme, no vision other than to cede as little ground as possible to Reform UK.

That has been obvious since the earliest days of the administration. Hitting pensioners and then farmers by taking away winter fuel payments and inheritance tax exemptions, while at the same time rewarding militant transport unions with inflation-busting rises for no more productivity, seemed a betrayal of whatever trust the electorate had placed in Labour.

In the end there was little to be surprised about: partly because of the leaks, of course, but mainly because in policy terms this budget broke no new ground. Income tax is going up but only by stealth; there is a raid on owners of electric cars and, as a sop to Labour’s left wing, an end to the two-child benefit cap. Consequently, unemployment and therefore the benefits bill is expected to rise. So it’s a vicious circle.

The good news – though not if you own an expensive home in the South East – is that houses worth more than £2m will incur a council tax surcharge. Some call it a mansion tax; to others it’s just spreading the money more evenly. There’s also a promised cut of £150 from next year’s household energy bills and permanently lower rates for three-quarters of a million businesses in the leisure and hospitality sectors.

Oh, and there’s a freeze on train fares but still no news of when or if improvements to the North’s rail infrastructure will see the light of day.

Now, you can spin that any way you like: taxes at an all-time high and £15bn handed to welfare claimants; that’s how the other parties see it. That’s technically correct but not necessarily a detriment to supporters of those parties. One estimate is that a third of Reform voters are on benefits: good luck getting such a big handout if they take office.

And in the final analysis, it wasn’t about what was done but the way it was done. Some people (including the Chancellor herself, it was said) ascribed the criticism to misogyny – she is after all the first woman to hold the office. But in attempting to conduct a half-dialogue about what she might or might not do, she exposed more of herself than any of her predecessors had done.

If she and her boss survive long enough to deliver another budget they will have to learn that communication is not about massaging the numbers, it’s about winning hearts and minds. That is a battle they still have to face.