Unless you have taken the wholly reasonable stance of avoiding the news over the past 10 days or so, you will be aware that the nation’s finances are in something of a pickle. The plan had been for the government to make savings from the welfare budget – the working assumptions are that by the end of this decade around £90 billion will be spent on benefits for people of working age who have health-related issues – but that was scuppered after a huge revolt by backbench Labour MPs. One of the consequences is that there is now a ‘black hole’ of around £5 billion that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, will have to fill when she delivers her budget (from the briefcase shown on the home page) come the autumn.

The most dramatic moment of Keir Starmer’s backing down in the House of Commons was the image of Reeves sitting just behind the PM while he was on his feet, her tears palpable. While that was shocking, in a different way so was the aftermath. Reeves’ distress was such that the bond market thought she was about to be fired, and got very jittery about it. (Not quite Liz Truss jittery, but shaky nevertheless.) The market feared a less stern chancellor would be bad news. Starmer felt forced to make it plain pretty quickly that “she is not going anywhere”. But she still has that hole to fill.

Janes Carville, chief strategist to Bill Clinton when he was the US president, once said: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” So it seems. It has now spoken and it is clear that Reeves will not break her fiscal rules, despite the straitjacket they have become, which as their primary target have the goal of day-to-day government spending being met by revenues by the end of the decade. Which means she has to come up with another plan.

Writing in The Times last week, Paul Johnson, the outgoing head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), said: “Chancellors should have three levers to pull to manage the nation’s finances: tax, spend and borrow. This chancellor does not have three levers. There is no scope for more borrowing and, it seems, none for less spending. That leaves tax.” Prior to the last election the IFS accused both Labour and the Conservatives of deceiving the public as to the true state of the economy, declaring that they could not get away with carrying on pretending that there need be no change to income tax, national insurance and/or VAT. (Reeves did increase employers’ national insurance contributions, itself a move that has probably hit the jobs market.)

Come the autumn, we will surely see some movement in one or all three of those areas, very possibly accompanied with the attempted dishonest deflection that such rises are not taxes on ‘working people’ even though people who run their own small businesses are indeed ‘working people’.