Chancellors don’t usually give speeches before budgets – and if they do, they tend to say nothing. But Sir Keir Starmer needed a line to bat away awkward questions from the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and Ms Reeves provided it. She has also given cover for the leadership’s ideologically conservative fiscal policies, now enforced in parliament through a three-line whip on the two-child benefit cap during an opposition day debate about welfare.