Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oskirts

I'm joined today by Michael Simmons and James Heel, who are fresh from live streaming.

Just gone off air on our reality check special looking at the spring statement, so I would

encourage you if you want a sort of

more in-depth view of what just happened in the House of Commons, then do head over to our YouTube

channel and find that. Michael, Spring Statement, we expected it to be quite thin on the ground policy-wise,

but there was literally nothing from an economic standpoint. Yeah, and you've got to, in a sense, hand it to

the Chancellor in the Treasury because they set out here with an objective, which was for nobody

to pay any attention to this. They didn't want the markets to react. They didn't want

months of speculation about whether there was going to be a black hole to fill. And I think

her speech will have largely achieved that. I mean, it's not going to be the top story tomorrow.

That's going to be whatever is going on in the Middle East. But even if bombs were not falling

in the Middle East, I think, as you say, those lack of policy announcements mean she's achieved

that goal. It was slightly bizarre, though, because she reiterated this point that as part of the

stability, as part of fighting uncertainty, the fiscal room, the fiscal headroom, the margin of error

against the fiscal rules was not going to be assessed

twice a year, only once year at the budget. But then, you know, a few seconds after saying that,

she then said that the headroom had improved slightly anyway, which made you think, well,

what actually is it? The striking comment, really, from me is what James and I started our live stream talking about,

which is, is the paper that this statement was written on, you know, worth anything given what's

happening in the world right now? And I think this point makes it really stark. In the OBR's

EFO documents, so essentially setting out all these forecasts, you can look and

...