This time it’s Tory leader Kemi Badenoch making the charge. Yesterday she blasted the Chancellor for misrepresenting budget forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, saying: “She sold her ‘Benefits Street’ Budget on a lie.” She even demanded Reeves’s resignation, adding: “Honesty matters… she has to go.”

Honesty does matter. Especially when you’re in charge of the nation’s finances and you’re deliberately talking down the UK economy, risking a bond market wobble, just to play political games.

Badenoch has her own motives, of course, so it’s worth hearing what independent economist Paul Johnson, former director of the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, has to say.

He told The Times that Reeves’s November briefing, when she warned of income tax hikes, “probably was misleading”. He added: “It was designed to confirm a narrative that there was a fiscal hole that needed to be filled with significant tax rises. In fact, as she knew at the time, no such hole existed.”

Today, Reeves will set out her defence. And it’s so dishonest, it’s jaw-dropping.

The accusation is simple. Reeves justified Wednesday’s tax blitz by pretending the public finances were in a far worse state than they really were. After being told by the OBR she was on course for a £4.2billion surplus Treasury aides still briefed the Financial Times that she faced a “£20billion hit to public finances”.

She might even have got away with it, until the OBR itself called her out on Friday evening. Chair Richard Hughes broke with convention and revealed the forecasts his team had given Reeves over the previous 10 weeks. They’re normally kept secret, which shows just how angry he must have been.

Yesterday I set out a damning prosecution case against the Chancellor. Now we can see the shape of her defence.

Starmer and Reeves are claiming the £4.2billion surplus didn’t include the cost of the winter fuel U-turn, which blew £1.25billion, nor the extra £5billion needed after her retreat on welfare cuts, or the £3billion price tag of scrapping the two-child benefit cap. Combined, they left us £5billion in the red.

I have two things to say about that. First, all three costs have one thing in common. They were created by Reeves and Starmer, through dithering, weak leadership and political cowardice.

Second, the jaw-dropping bit. A senior government source dismissed the whole affair as a “silly row brought about by people who can’t do maths”. Whoever that patronising git was, I’d like to hear them explain how a £5billion deficit somehow justified a brutal £26billion tax raid.

This has nothing to do with maths. It’s pure politics. Reeves wanted to extract more from taxpayers to reward Labour’s client groups: backbench MPs, unions, the public sector and benefits claimants. And she was willing to “lie” or “mislead”, whichever you prefer, to do it.

Yet Downing Street insists there was “no attempt to deceive in any form”. Another porkie, this time signed off in No 10, as so many have been before. No shock there. Starmer and Reeves are close allies, united in their belief that voters will swallow whatever falsehoods they serve up.

Governments have spun and lied before, but rarely so consistently, and so clumsily.

Reeves will survive this, I think. Her loose relationship with the truth has carried her this far, and it’ll carry her a little further.

Eventually it’ll bring her crashing down though. Sadly, we’ll have to wait for that cathartic moment. But it will come. Voters will only swallow so much.