Saving the Tory party might be harder than we thought...

Rachel Reeves walked into the chamber wearing a funeral director's expression that quelled any hurrahs on the Labour benches. Backbenchers took one look at her baleful glare and quietened down.

- JOE MURPHY

Opposite, Jeremy Hunt simmered petulantly. He had seen an advance copy of her statement and knew what was coming. Around the chamber, expectations sharpened, the mood intensified. This was shaping up to be more important than some end-of-term knockabout statement. Indeed it was. It was a defenestration. A political and economic disembowelment of the last government.

“Mr Speaker, on my first day as chancellor of the Exchequer, I asked Treasury officials to assess the state of public spending,” Reeves began. “That work is now complete.” Her tone was one of ice-cold anger – like a company shareholder explaining why he had needed to call in the fraud squad following the departure of a dodgy accountant. “First, I will expose the scale – and the seriousness – of what has been uncovered,” she scowled.

Most people’s image of Reeves is probably the video they keep playing on 24-hour news channels of her walking up Downing Street on 5 May looking awfully pleased with herself. But she told us how she had discovered, in her first weeks in office, that “there were things I did not know. Things that the party opposite covered up”.

Hunt crossed his legs awkwardly, adopting what psychologists might interpret as a stressed position. Now he began fidgeting and muttering “Rubbish.” But Reeves was relentless. A £22bn black hole of unfunded promises. The national reserves not just blown, but double-spent. She did not quite point a finger across the chamber with a trembling bellow of “J’accuse”, but that was the gist.

On she went: unfunded promises had not been shown to the Office for Budget Responsibility (an allegation that raises questions about what will happen to the Treasury civil servants who did not pass this information to the spending watchdog – presumably a matter at least as deserving of an inquiry as Partygate).