𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

KEMI Badenoch has launched a scathing attack on Rachel Reeves by insisting if the Chancellor “had any decency she would have gone by now”.

The Conservative leader slammed Ms Reeves days after her calamitous Benefits Street budget on Wednesday last week.

The Tories’ online petition called “Sack Reeves Now” had already amassed more than 35,000 signatures by on Sunday afternoon in a bid to pile pressure on the Government ahead of a major speech by the Prime Minister on Monday.

The Labour leader will attempt to defend his under-fire Chancellor in a Downing Street address following accusations she misled the public over the state of the nation’s finances.

Writing in the Express, Mrs Badenoch said: “Rachel Reeves is still refusing to come clean about why she called a press conference on 4 November to warn about the state of the economy, when she’d actually been told things were much better than feared.

“The Chancellor and her allies told us at the time that they cut into breakfast TV schedules to

ruin our Cheerios because the financial forecasts had got worse.

“But in the days since the budget, documents published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) have shown that the Chancellor knew she was going to have more money available to her, not less.”

She added: “If Reeves had any decency she would have gone by now. And if she won’t go, Keir Starmer should grow a backbone and sack her.”

In an awkward TV showdown, Ms Reeves refused to look Mrs Badenoch in the eye on Sunday.

The Chancellor looked away while she was stared down by Mrs Badenoch on screen before their separate BBC interviews.

Ms Reeves went on to complain that she felt “uncomfortable” by the Opposition chief’s brutal attacks in the Commons.

She swiped that Mrs Badenoch had been “personal” in her jibes, which included ridiculing the Chancellor’s gripes about “mansplaining”.

But Mrs Badenoch told presenter Laura Kuenssberg that her “job is to hold the Government to account, not to provide emotional support for the Chancellor”.

She added that Labour ministers “like to dish it but they can’t take it” and repeated her demand for Ms Reeves to quit for “telling lies”.

It comes as pre-Budget speculation had suggested Ms Reeves faced a significant gap in her spending plans, partly because of a downgrade to productivity forecasts expected to be delivered by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The Chancellor herself fed that speculation in a speech in Downing Street last month when she said weaker productivity had “consequences for the public finances” in the form of “lower tax receipts”.

Opposition politicians have claimed this was “misleading” because the OBR had already provided her with a forecast showing the situation was not as bad as feared.

But the Chancellor insisted that she did not fib to Britons about the state of the public finances ahead of the Budget.

Asked directly by Sky News’ Sir Trevor Phillips if she lied, she said: “Of course I didn’t.”

She said she needed tax rises to create more fiscal headroom – which is the amount by which the government can increase spending or cut taxes without breaking its own fiscal rules – in a bid to reassure the financial markets and create stability in the economy.

While the OBR did deliver a productivity downgrade that wiped £16billion off expected tax receipts, much of that was cancelled out by inflation and higher wage growth, leaving a £4.2 billion surplus against Ms Reeves’s borrowing rules.

But on Sunday, she pointed out this would have been the lowest headroom any chancellor had secured against their fiscal rules.

The OBR also did not take into account decisions such as the U-turn on cutting winter fuel payments or welfare reform, or the abolition of the two-child benefit cap, expected to take 450,000 children out of poverty.

Meanwhile the Conservatives and the SNP have written to the Financial Conduct Authority calling for an investigation into policy leaks in the run-up to the Budget.

The Conservatives have written to Sir demanding Ms Reeves come before MPs immediately to explain her conduct surrounding the Budget and the period leading up to it.

Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart has accused the Chancellor of “a serious breach of trust with Parliament and with the British people,” both by breaking her promises not to raise taxes on working people and by repeatedly misleading the public about the state of the nation’s finances in an attempt to justify it.

The letter states that widely reported Treasury briefings may constitute market manipulation and therefore a criminal offence.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has urged the Prime Minister’s independent standards adviser to launch an inquiry into potential breaches of the ministerial code, which demands ministers “give accurate and truthful information to Parliament” and are “as open as possible with Parliament and the public”.

In a letter to Sir Laurie Magnus, Mr Farage accused Ms Reeves of “a sustained and deliberate narrative advanced across multiple platforms, after the OBR forecasts were known to the Treasury, and in circumstances where the existence of fiscal headroom was not being disclosed to Parliament or to the public”.

Sir Keir is expected to be grilled on the issue when he stands by his Chancellor in a post-Budget Downing Street address on Monday.

He is set to say that the fiscal statement last week set the country on the “right economic course”.

The Labour leader will add: “Rooting out excessive costs in every corner of the economy is an essential step to lower the cost of living for good, as well as promoting more dynamic markets for business”.

But Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride called it “frankly laughable” to hear the Prime Minister say Ms Reeves’ Benefits Street Budget has put the country on the right course and that he wants to fix the welfare system.

Sir Mel added: “His Chancellor has just hiked taxes by £26 billion to pay for a welfare splurge, penalising people who work hard and making them pay for those who don’t work at all. And she misrepresented why she was doing it, claiming there was a fiscal black hole to fill that she knew didn’t exist.

“Labour’s leadership have repeatedly shown they lack the backbone to tackle welfare and instead are just acting to placate their left-wing backbenchers. Only the Conservatives will cut welfare spending by £23 billion and get Britain working again.”

The speech will build on the Budget’s fallout which began when details of the announcement were were mistakenly released to the public almost an hour early.

An investigation into the unprecedented leak will report back on Monday, the Chancellor has said.

The OBR apologised for the leak and immediately launched a probe, with expert input from Professor Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Despite Prof Martin’s involvement, the OBR has said there is no reason to suspect a cyber attack.

Although Ms Reeves declined to say whether she thought OBR chairman Richard Hughes would have to resign, she said she had “a huge amount of respect” for both him and his organisation.

Last week, Mr Hughes said he had been “mortified” by the leak and told an event hosted by the Resolution Foundation that he would resign if he lost the confidence of the Chancellor and the Commons Treasury Committee.