Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones today became the latest minister to dutifully invoke the spectre of Truss — to no avail. Meanwhile, voters’ patience with the line about a “black hole” in the public finances was finite even before the OBR basically scotched the claim on Wednesday. The markets are still reacting badly to the Budget, as are the voters; just as worryingly for Labour, its fig leaf of a City support network has folded.

The Starmer government’s decision to try and make hay out of Truss is perfectly understandable. The mini-Budget was a self-inflicted disaster by someone who was fundamentally bad at politics: £40 billion of deficit-financed tax cuts that panicked the markets, which were then hurriedly balanced by the promise of £40 billion in spending cuts she could never have delivered.

Yet it clearly isn’t the load-bearing argument Labour thought it was. The most important reason for this is that it is possible to make too much of a good thing, and the present government is making far too much of the mini-Budget. Yes, the markets reacted badly and mortgage rates went up. But the idea that it is the root of all our current economic woes — and the difficult decisions the Government is having to make — is self-evidently ridiculous.

Britain’s core problem is the growing gulf between public expectations of the state and the state’s capacity to finance itself. There’s no appetite for broad tax rises, nor for serious cuts to entitlement spending, and — as Labour is discovering — no large pool of easy targets who can be squeezed for lots of extra cash.

These are longstanding structural problems which have nothing to do with the mini-Budget. Indeed, they are the very shoal upon which Truss eventually foundered: she had no way to deliver her tax cuts without huge borrowing, which the markets wouldn’t stand, or huge spending cuts, which the public wouldn’t.

But, politically, the other problem for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves is the way they fought the election. David Cameron got to dine out on Labour supposedly trashing the economy because he spent two years selling that narrative in Opposition, and then fought an election campaign which sought a mandate for some sort of austerity programme.

Labour did not do that this time, and avoided making any pledges that might frighten the horses. One reason the Chancellor is in such a bind now is that her determination to stick close to Conservative plans allowed Jeremy Hunt to box her in on tax pledges.

Starmer was rewarded with a historic Commons majority. But it’s not a majority bestowed with either a mandate from the public or — of more practical importance — a commitment from MPs to do anything dramatic or unpopular.

That greatly weakens the line about Truss, in particular, because the mini-Budget was a known quantity before the election. If its impact on the economy is the basis for any unpopular policy, that policy could have been in the manifesto. Hence the need for a new nonsense about the “black hole” — which isn’t working either.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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