You couldn’t make it up. We didn’t just get a disastrous Budget; we got it leaked early. And it was more a case of ‘spoil your day’ than ‘spoiler alert’.

The OBR documents, the ones that move financial markets and affect every mortgage and pension in the country, were released by mistake hours before the Chancellor was due to speak. For a government that promised ‘serious, responsible leadership’, this is a shambles of the highest order.

If a business leaked sensitive financial information before a major announcement, they’d be shut down, struck off and dragged over hot coals by regulators. In Whitehall? Just another Wednesday for Kier & Co.

And after all that chaos, what did we actually get from Rachel Reeves? More pain. More tax. More punishment for the people who create the wealth of this country – the small firms, the grafters, the apprentices, the builders, the engineers, the trades, the entrepreneurs.

This was a great Budget – for people thinking of moving to Dubai, Spain, Italy or anywhere else they can invest their money without being hammered by the Treasury.

The Government’s message to business? Pay up, shut up.

Extending the freeze on employer National Insurance until 2031 is a straight-up tax raid on jobs. It doesn’t take an economist to know what happens next. Hiring slows down, investment dries up confidence collapses and unemployment creeps higher -exactly as the ONS figures already warned.

The Chancellor had the chance today to admit her mistake after last year’s employer NI hike. Instead, she doubled down on it. It’s the fiscal version of crashing your car and then deciding the solution is to drive faster.

For SMEs, the squeeze is becoming unbearable

Let’s get real. Most small firms aren’t on the edge they’re over it. Energy bills up. Insurance up. Rates up. Wages up. Compliance up. And now an NICs freeze that ensures costs will keep rising every single year.

Meanwhile, the Government is pulling in record tax receipts and still can’t balance its books. That’s not ‘stability’. That’s mismanagement.

The OBR leak tells you everything about this Government

You can tell a lot about an organisation by how it handles information. Businesses protect sensitive data because livelihoods depend on it. This Government? It leaks the most important financial document of the year early because someone clicked the wrong button.

If the people running the system can’t even manage a PDF properly, how are they supposed to run an economy?

They should be backing business. Instead, they’re bleeding it dry.

Every entrepreneur I speak to says the same thing: This administration does not understand business. Not the risk, the graft, not the pressure of making payroll or the responsibility of employing people and keeping their families afloat.

Businesses aren’t asking for handouts just a level playing field and a government that doesn’t treat them like the enemy.

The reckoning is coming

When the dust settles from this shambolic Budget, people will realise something, you can’t build a growing economy when your policies actively suffocate the people who grow it.

Today’s Budget didn’t give anyone confidence not workers, not pensioners, not entrepreneurs. And make no mistake, when confidence goes, investment follows it out the door and when investment goes, jobs go. When that happens, governments fall.

If Labour doesn’t change course, fast, this Budget won’t just be remembered as the day the OBR leaked early. It’ll be remembered as the moment Britain finally lost patience.