Cloak and dagger budgeteering and Labour’s great transparency retreat

There is something faintly comic, if it were not so serious, about a government insisting it has nothing to hide while simultaneously dimming the lights, closing the curtains and shuffling the paperwork into an unmarked envelope.

Labour’s handling of the Office for Budget Responsibility leak fiasco has the unmistakable aroma of panic masquerading as prudence, and the Conservatives are spot on to cry foul. This is not on.

We were first told the forecasts behind Rachel Reeves’s Budget had been accessed a mere 43 times before she rose to her feet in the Commons, an administrative hiccup, nothing more, move along please.

Except the truth, stubborn as a badly parked bus, has now lumbered into view. The National Cyber Security Centre says those documents were downloaded at least 24,701 times in the hour before the speech, tens of thousands more as links ricocheted across social media, from more than 10,000 unique addresses. There were even hundreds of failed attempts beforehand, like digital burglars rattling every door handle in Whitehall.

And who, one wonders, was promptly thrown under the bus and lost their job. The chairman of the OBR, Richard Hughes, resigned over what his own organisation called its worst failure in fifteen years. Heads rolled at the watchdog, yet ministers hover in a curious political hovercraft above the wreckage, serenely untouched, gazing down and murmuring about “process”.

Labour, it seems, can never quite take the blame, can they.

The leak was not trivial. It confirmed major tax measures before the Chancellor spoke, including a levy on middle class homes and a prolonged stealth raid on incomes, detonating the drama of Budget day before the red box was even warm. Add to that the earlier discovery that her Spring Statement had been accessed in advance, not zero times as first claimed but sixteen, and you begin to see a pattern emerging, the sort of pattern that normally provokes searching questions rather than a hurried rearrangement of the filing system.

Yet the Treasury’s answer has been to announce that the OBR will be less transparent in future, publishing fewer details about when forecasts are handed over, with timetables now “under review”. In other words, after a leak, the solution is to pull down the blinds. Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, called the move astounding, and he is being polite. Less openness, as several economists have pointed out, risks spooking markets and muddying confidence in how fiscal policy is shaped. Cloak and dagger is no substitute for competence.

There is an almost theatrical irony here. Ministers insist the clampdown is about security, yet the effect is to deepen suspicion, not dispel it. When you lie about the scale of a breach, or at best speak far too soon with wildly wrong numbers, and then tighten secrecy, people naturally wonder what else is being hidden. Transparency is not something you ration after a scandal, it is what you deploy in industrial quantities.

Labour’s defenders mutter about cyber threats and rogue actors, and of course any leak of market sensitive information is serious. But the government was also unable to identify the source of a separate Financial Times story about abandoned tax rises, another drip in a long, soggy trail of unofficial briefings. The picture is not of a machine under attack from outside, but of one leaking from within, while insisting the plumbing is perfect.

Meanwhile, weeks of tension between the Treasury and the OBR over downgraded growth forecasts hover awkwardly in the background, along with accusations that the Chancellor oversold the gloom of the public finances in briefings that later looked overstated. None of this inspires confidence that everything is being done in the clear, with the public fully in the loop.

So yes, the Conservatives are right to say this stinks. You cannot trumpet fiscal responsibility while fumbling the nation’s most sensitive documents, then respond by publishing less about how decisions are made. You cannot sacrifice an official at the watchdog and pretend the political masters are merely innocent bystanders caught in the spray.

This episode has all the hallmarks of a government using one mistake to hide further embarrassment, a retreat into procedural fog when sunlight would be the healthier disinfectant. If Labour wants to be trusted with the nation’s finances, it should start by telling the whole story, promptly, plainly and without creative arithmetic.

Until then, voters are left squinting through the smoke, wondering who really knew what and when, and why the doors keep closing just when the questions get interesting.

By Claire Bullivant