Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots Live in partnership with Charles Stanley Wealth Managers.

I'm Katie Balls, and I'm delighted to be joined by Michael Gove, the edge of the spectator,

David Frost, peer, and former Brexit negotiator, and James Kangasorium, a regular and coffeehouse

shots live and a generally wise man who's also a pollster. Now, we're going to have

Morris Glassman, the only Labour politician to attend Donald Trump's inauguration here in due

course.

In the meantime, though, we're going to get things underway, and we have two parts to today,

but there's an interval. I'm going to give you the good news now. I've been told there

are free drinks during the interval. There you go. But to get there, we're going to have

to do some graphs. So behind me, we should shortly see

because obviously we've had Rachel Reeves's spring statement. Now, of course, this was never

meant to be a major event. When Rachel Reeves first came in, she said that her plan was to effectively

have the autumn budget and the spring

statement would just be a little update, perhaps we wouldn't even really notice in terms of what

was going on.

Unfortunately for Rachel Reeves, in the time since her tax raising budget to the tune of

$40 billion, the public finances have deteriorated.

We can talk with the panel about why that might be,

what factors are at play, but it meant that Rachel Ruiz had effectively do a corrective this week.

We had it confirmed that her headroom had disappeared. We also had the growth forecast for next

year, slashed in half, and she had to announce about 15 billion in cuts in order

to get that headroom back. It's not, I wouldn't say she's the most popular for the country

...