First, without too much portentousness, rarely will a routine fiscal event be so scrutinised for market response. Gilt yields - that is, the cost of government borrowing - will be pored over in the coming days, as will further movements in the price of sterling. This government, to be fair, inherited huge piles of debt - legacies of furlough during the Covid pandemic, and of energy bill subsidies following the invasion of Ukraine. But that’s been compounded by a Labour parliamentary party unwilling to make savings from existing departmental spend and new pressures from tariffs and trade barriers. Markets will be looking to the Chancellor for reassurance that she’ll resist demands for further public spending.

Two, and linked to market scepticism, is a remarkable strategy change right in the middle of the Budget process. The Chancellor primed voters and investors in a press conference for pain across income tax bands. Days later, HMT let it be known that manifesto-breaking income tax rise was off the table. Market skittishness meant we have the rationale of the decision over a week before the Chancellor stood up - because HMT feared abreaction from markets assuming Rachel Reeves was putting politics before financial discipline. A u-turn on what was already a thin tax pledge at the 2024 election would have been extraordinary. To contemplate it - and then to publicly reverse the speculation you yourself started - is almost as peculiar. Voters notice chaos like this. They’re never impressed by it.

Three, for a Government still closer to the start of this Parliament than the end of it, authority has badly ebbed away. Budgets should be a demonstration of the Chancellor’s power. Some of the measures today show just how much political capital has already been squandered. Removing the two-child benefit cap is popular in the Commons with many (vocal) Labour MPs. But it’s much less so with the country - YouGov say 60% of the general public and, strikingly, half of Labour voters would prefer to leave the cap as is. When Labour MPs rebelled over proposed welfare cuts earlier this year, the Government briefed their actions made plans to scrap the cap unaffordable.

But with the priority now Westminster party management, that choice has changed. It leaves Labour vulnerable to the charge that they have increased taxes in order to expand welfare payments by around £9 billion.

Four, the novel approach to media management. The PM and Chancellor are skating on such thin ice that they chose to set the vast majority of the Budget - one of relatively few set pieces in the Parliamentary year when a governing party feels they can speak directly to the country - out ahead of time, and reduce risk today. We knew the themes - reducing NHS waiting lists, cutting debt, and focusing on the cost of living - ages ago. Several of the eye-catching measures, like freezing rail fares, raising the minimum wage, tourist taxes, reducing energy bills, a new milkshake tax, were officially briefed, not leaked, well in advance. The whole plan belies the sense of nervousness felt by Downing Street advisers.

It seems almost churlish to add a fifth point - but the OBR’s accidental early publication of their forecast document, thus leaking virtually the entirety of the Budget an hour and a half early, is rather worse than the Chancellor’s verdict of “disappointing.” It looks incompetent. And it meant that anyone was able to read the OBR’s outlook without the political gloss HMT have worked so hard on. The OBR have growth forecasts up this year but cut in the next four, debt growing as a share of the economy, and the tax burden rising to (a record) 38% of GDP by 2031.

Weak Governments always face hard questions about their policy choices. In the weeks to come many will ask what this Budget means for Labour’s electoral coalition. That will be accompanied by speculation about the PM’s future - aided by some calamitous briefing from No 10 intended to do the exact opposite - which is becoming more and more overt. So with his fate and his Chancellor’s now bound together, it’s not yet clear if the tax measures as delivered will hold. There is more fiscal headroom built in this time, but also more spending from £26 billion of tax rises.

The Chancellor chose to use her Budget to try to quell a restive Labour party and bolster political confidence in this administration. She did so at the expense of some of the hard choices that might have strengthened her hand economically in future. What remains is to see how much time Rachel Reeves has bought herself.