Why Rachel Reeves wants everyone to know that the Tories left the Treasury brassic | Andrew Rawnsley

The chancellor is not just preparing the ground for some tax rises. She’s also warning her party that there will be extremely difficult decisions about spending

You think that the public finances are in a bad way? Tomorrow (Monday) Rachel Reeves will come to parliament to tell you different. No, the chancellor will say, adopting the shocked-and-appalled tone that she has perfected. After a rummage through the skeletons in the Treasury’s cupboard, she will declare that what she has discovered is not merely bad, it is diabolical. Her statement asserting that the Tories left Britain broke will be followed by a news conference to hammer home the same message. This will come just before the Commons departs for its summer break. Do not expect sunshine from the chancellor. She will be thunderous. The volume will be turned up to deafening on the “things are even worse than we thought” mantra which she has been blasting out from the day she arrived at Number 11.

One reason she will do this will be in pursuit of the strategy, which I described a fortnight ago, of superglueing culpability for their legacy on to the Conservatives and doing so at a time when they are too numbed by their election defeat to mount much of a counter-narrative. She will also lay it on thick because it is hard to fault her contention that there was abysmal financial mismanagement by the Tories and it became more dreadful towards their end. To try to keep his show on the road, Rishi Sunak resorted to raiding the contingency reserve and making significant funding commitments without knowing where the money was supposed to come from. Rather than grasp difficult decisions, the previous government sat on them in the hope that they would go away (they haven’t) or become Labour’s problem (they have). This decision-dodging was especially true of anything that came with a big price tag, such as whether or not to accept the recommendations on public sector pay from the independent review bodies. The recommendation is for 514,000 teachers and 1.3 million NHS staff to get a 5.5% pay rise. The Conservatives failed to make proper provision for this and the Treasury will need to find around £5 billion if it is to meet the bill. Ms Reeves has indicated that she would like to on the grounds that there is “a cost” to rejecting the recommendations. Sure could be. Strikes by teachers and in the NHS would surely curtail Labour’s time in the honeymoon suite. Replicated across the public sector, this level of pay increase would bring the total hit to the exchequer to around £10 billion.

Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer