A make-or-break week for the UK government

·27 min·2 clips

Keir Starmer's last-minute trip to Johannesburg mirrors Liz Truss's fateful journey before the 2022 mini-budget.

Budget week, finally. Pippa Carrera and Kieran Stacey begin with the Chancellor about to get up in the House of Commons after weeks of waiting. The timing is awkward, almost comically so. Kieran has just returned from Johannesburg with the Prime Minister, after two overnight eleven-hour flights and less than forty-eight hours on the ground for the G20 summit. Not much glamour in that. Politically, the trip lands badly because it sits right next to a major budget, at a moment when everything already feels chaotic. The Chancellor has three audiences to get through: Labour MPs, the markets, and the public. Labour MPs are weighing how much pain they can carry from things like frozen income tax thresholds and smaller tax rises. The markets want to know whether she can stick to her fiscal course instead of drifting into more borrowing. The public is the hardest audience, because public patience is the thing the budget ultimately spends. The episode treats the budget as a bundle of choices that could come apart in more than one place. Then there are the leaks. Kieran makes a neat Westminster point: this may not be a normal leaked budget so much as a budget where the size of the fiscal problem made the options visible. Once journalists knew a lot of money had to be found, they could test ideas with sources and read the Treasury's silences. The Treasury, as described here, seems to have nudged reporters toward some options, or at least chosen not to push them away.

As heard by us

A budget-week briefing that keeps its feet in the process.

Budget Week is treated here as a stress test, not a routine set piece. Politics Weekly UK keeps the focus on the Chancellor's Commons statement, with the Prime Minister's Johannesburg trip, the leak talk, and the likely tax rises all feeding the same sense of pressure around the…

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Hear how Budget Week looks from inside Westminster, where things already feel quite chaotic.

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