Finally, Rachel Reeves has given Keir Starmer something to smile about

As the chancellor delivered her spring statement, I was watching the prime minister, sitting beside her. For once, he did not look worried or tense. He was enjoying himself. At one point, he put his finger to his lips to shush an over-excited shadow minister opposite – Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, I think.

When Rachel Reeves attacked Reform, which she did several times in her 24-minute speech, Keir Starmer pointed at its bench in the far corner, saying: “You… you…”

Reeves had started her speech with a fixed smile reminiscent of Gordon Brown’s, but she couldn’t keep it up, dropping into her hectoring expression as she laid into the Conservatives for messing up the economy, and into Reform for threatening to repeat the same mistakes.

She was nervous and mangled some of her lines, including boasting about delivering “the promise that we changed” when she meant “the change that we promised”. But as she went on, she seemed to realise that the speech was going well, and she relaxed.

Reeves recited the forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that GDP per person would rise in this parliament, compared with a fall in the last. The Tory barracking abated at this point, and she went off-script to declare: “I didn’t hear them that time!” The forced smile was now replaced by a very unforced throaty laugh, as she realised that she was winning.

Starmer was also at ease with himself throughout. He knew that he and his chancellor had played this one well. Not only were the OBR numbers better for the government than expected, but there’s a war on.

Nobody is in favour of war, obviously, especially not in the Labour Party, but sometimes, out of sadness, good things come. Starmer’s refusal to take part in the first strikes against Iran, and his pious adherence to his friend and attorney general Richard Hermer’s definition of international law means that his standing in the party has been transformed overnight. Not only that, but he is on the right side of public opinion.

The other thing about a war is that it makes all the numbers in the OBR report out of date. If the oil price stays high, everything Reeves said in her speech is redundant.

Again, another oil price crisis may be a bad thing – but, for Reeves and Starmer, there would be a silver lining. It would mean that if all the impressive-sounding numbers in Reeves’s speech fail to materialise, it would not be her fault.

“Everything can be wiped out by a change of course,” she said. She meant a Tory or Reform government, but a sustained oil price rise could do the same.

In the meantime, the OBR numbers were better than expected, and so – out of date as they were – Reeves was going to savour her moment of triumph. The rabbit that her advisers had sworn would definitely, definitely not be in her metaphorical hat was going to be held aloft, however dead it was.

She had underplayed today’s statement for months beforehand, insisting that she would now do only one “fiscal event” a year, at the Budget. So this wouldn’t be like last year’s spring statement, when she panicked into announcing £5bn-a-year cuts in disability benefit to fill a mid-year hole in the accounts – cuts that were later abandoned because Labour MPs wouldn’t vote for them.

This time, she said, the OBR’s forecast would not include an “assessment of performance against the fiscal rules”, so nobody could say that she was breaking them.

Except that the Treasury extracted the numbers from the OBR report anyway, and she triumphantly declared that she was on track to meet her fiscal rules in 2028-29 by a slightly bigger margin than before.

Or, at least, she had been, before the world oil price soared. Before the bombs dropped on Iran, the public finances were looking up in the later years of the forecast because the stock market is higher than expected.

That meant that, although growth was forecast to be lower than expected this year, there was the promise of jam tomorrow – higher growth than previously predicted in later years.

All we can be sure of, now, is lower growth this year. Yet Reeves managed to spin this as a triumph of economic management – and Starmer beamed happily by her side, knowing that an international crisis is good news for his chances of survival.