Has the Reeves Budget made it through Day 2 relatively unscathed?

The broadcasters flew no helicopter over the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ modest premises in Bloomsbury on Thursday morning, but the verdict issued by Paul Johnson and his team is almost as important as the Budget itself, which got the full Skycopter treatment.

It is at the IFS press conference the day after a Budget that we usually discover whether the fine-sounding words delivered in the House of Commons are going to unravel – and whether the chancellor is likely to be forced into making a humiliating retreat on one policy or other.

George Osborne had to reverse the pasty tax after his “omnishambles” Budget of 2012. Philip Hammond had to abandon a national insurance hike on white van man in 2017. And Kwasi Kwarteng had to resign and allow Jeremy Hunt to cancel his entire mini-Budget in 2022 – although that one was a special case: it did not require the IFS’s analysis to spook the markets.

So far, it looks as if the wheels have stayed on Rachel Reeves’s first Budget.

The IFS was rude about unrealistic projections for future years, but praised many of the Budget decisions and – crucially – has failed to find the hidden mechanical fault that will require the chancellor to make a U-turn. Not that she can do a U-turn if the wheels have fallen off.

Johnson, the IFS director, was certainly critical: “She is meeting her borrowing target only by repeating the same silly manoeuvres as her predecessors used to make it look as if the books will balance.” But most people are familiar with his tone of exasperation by now, and recognise that it is directed at both parties with admirable impartiality.

And Johnson praised Reeves as much as he damned her. He said it was “courageous” and “the right thing to do” to increase borrowing for investment. He said her new primary fiscal rule was “sensible”, and that the spending increases look big relative to the previous government’s plans – “but that is, in large part, because their plans were unrealistic”.

The closest the IFS came on Thursday morning to finding an error in Reeves’s homework was to point out that the public spending increases are “front-loaded” in the early years of this parliament, and that the plans for later years remain unrealistic. “That will probably mean,” Johnson explained on the Today programme before the IFS unveiled its detailed findings, “unless she gets lucky with growth, more tax rises to come next year or the year after.”

But that is next year, or the year after. Reeves’s immediate aim is to make it to the end of the week without the entire Budget blowing up. In that aim, it looks as if she will succeed.

Lots of people have criticised the Budget and pointed out that she and Keir Starmer gave a very different impression before the election of what it would be like. But nobody has said what they would cut to make the sums add up with a smaller tax increase.

Yes, some farmers have kicked off. But their inheritance tax perk is not being cut until 2026, so there is plenty of time for that to be “adjusted”.

Some guns have fallen surprisingly silent. The Sun front page could only be described as soft: “At least she kept it down at the pumpkins!”, a contorted pun referring to Halloween, but paying tribute to the brute politics of Reeves’s surrender to the paper’s campaign against a petrol duty hike.

The International Monetary Fund was actually positive: “We support the envisaged reduction in the deficit over the medium term, including by sustainably raising revenue.”

That analysis, which is in line with the IFS, is right, I think. A tax rise was needed to stabilise the public finances and to give some hope of restoring public services to acceptable levels. This was the only big tax rise that could be presented, with a bit of sophistry, as compatible with Labour’s election promises.

There are big questions hanging over the next few years. Will the big increase in NHS funding produce results that voters will notice by the next election? (Over to you, Wes Streeting.) Will there need to be further tax rises in two years’ time? (Over to you, the gods of economic growth.)

But Reeves has passed her first test: her Budget has survived the Thursday Test. It has made it through the IFS exam.