4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Isabel Hardman presents highlights from Sunday morning's political shows.
Rachel Reeves says she can be trusted. But did she lie in the run-up to the budget?
Produced by Joe Bedell-Brill.
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free. |
| 0:18.3 | Hurry though, this ridiculously good offer, ends on the 1st of December. Go to |
| 0:23.2 | www.spectator.com.uk-U.K. forward slash Friday. Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. |
| 0:41.3 | I'm Isabel Hardman, and this is the Sunday Roundup. |
| 0:44.9 | This week, the budget is out, but most of the scrutiny is on the Chancellor |
| 0:48.7 | and whether she deliberately misled the public. |
| 0:52.3 | In a pre-budget speech this week, |
| 0:54.8 | Chancellor Rachel Reeves had given the impression |
| 0:56.8 | that the government was short on cash, |
| 0:59.1 | and tax rises were necessary to avert deep spending cuts. |
| 1:03.2 | In reality, the OBR reported a small surplus of £4 billion. |
| 1:07.5 | On the BBC, Laura Coonsberg asked the Chancellor if she had been lying. |
| 1:12.2 | Do you want people to trust you? |
| 1:14.5 | Yes, and I said during the election campaign that I want people to be able to trust me with the public finances. |
| 1:20.2 | I will never play fast and loose with the public finances, because when you do, it's ordinary family finances and business finances that pay the price. |
| 1:28.2 | And that's why in the budget this week, I was really clear going into it and coming out of it, |
| 1:33.4 | that I wanted to build up that fiscal economic resilience. |
| 1:37.0 | So the headroom that I had in the spring statement of £9.9 billion, I've taken that up to £21.7 billion. And I know that some |
| 1:46.5 | people are suggesting that there was a small surplus that the OBR published on Friday. But if I was |
| 1:54.3 | on this programme today, Laura, and I was saying £4 billion surplus is fine. There was no economic |
| 2:00.2 | repair job to be done. |
| 2:01.7 | I think you would rightly be saying that's not good enough. That would have been the lowest |
... |
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