TOMORROW’S Budget will be presented, like all of its kind, as a success story.

The government will announce significant-sounding spending commitments to tackle issues like the backlog in NHS operations and its readiness to lift the freeze on public-sector pay, but within a framework of spending restraint.

As in the spring, Chancellor Rishi Sunak may prove capable of wrongfooting the opposition in the process. Then, a mooted rise in corporation tax tricked Keir Starmer into loudly opposing such a move, undermining Labour’s claim to stand for a redistribution of wealth; having watched the party take the bait and infuriate its core supporters, Sunak then announced a sufficient delay to the proposal to render it hypothetical and irrelevant.