Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are still a long way from being ready for government

The opposition has tough questions to answer on its tax and spending plans, writes John Rentoul

Any deviation from Tory plans for tax or spending will have to be accounted for, and made to fit restrictive rules (PA)

George Osborne knows what it is like to be shadow chancellor for a party that is expected to form the government after the next election. He told Andrew Neil on Sunday that the pressure on him suddenly increased – a “blast of incoming fire” – because he had to have answers to questions about how the incoming government would tax and spend.

He said that Rachel Reeves was now in the same position, and there were some big gaps in Labour’s plans. Ed Balls, who was also on the programme, agreed: “That is not a sustainable line that we’ve just heard from Lisa Nandy,” he said. The shadow levelling-up secretary had been asked by Neil how a Labour government could borrow an extra £28bn a year for its climate plan and keep to its target of having debt fall as a share of national income.

Balls said “Labour has got time” and Reeves would come up with a policy, but there was no way that the current holding line – that the climate plan is an exception from the fiscal rules that would otherwise bind a Labour government as tightly as a Conservative one – would last for long.