This is The Guardian.

I think it's fair to say that the overall impression created by the government was misleading.

I needed to increase taxes, and I was honest and frank about that in the speech that I gave at the beginning of November.

The Chancellor has been accused of telling fibs about the state of the economy and the run-up to her budget,

and now Kirstama has come out swinging to defend her.

I didn't want to reach the manifesto, and that's why we came to the decisions that we did.

But has voters' trust been permanently damaged?

From The Guardian's Today in Focus,

this is the latest with me, Lucy Hall. Well, to help answer that, I'm joined by Archie Bland,

head of national news. Thanks for being with us, Archie, and thanks for joining us for our first

launch episode of Today in Focus. Very excited to be here. Thank you. It's great to have you. So, Kirsta met this morning speaking in London, this was supposed to be a kind of big bells and whistles, celebration of all of the positive things that the government was able to do in its budget last week. So reducing child poverty, freezing railfares, bringing down people's energy bills.

But that is not quite what occurred, was it?

No, and probably part of the problem here is that Starman needed to make this speech at all.

It's kind of a signal that perhaps the budget hasn't landed exactly as they would have liked and that they are trying to reassert control over the narrative.

Because they want to be talking about growth, about what they're doing on child poverty, on all those things.

They don't want to be talking about a long and complicated route about the OBR, but I'm afraid we're going to talk about that instead.

Yeah, it is both long and sadly complicated.

So this takes back to the start of last month when Rachel Reeves did this slightly

unusual, quite strange breakfast time press conference where she stood up just after 8 o'clock in the

morning. The tone being quite grave, it was like the forecast are much worse than expected. We're

going to have to put up your taxes. Sorry everyone, but brace yourselves for hard things to come.

But that wasn't quite what

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