Rachel Reeves’ response to the not-a-budget was one of the best Budget responses a shadow chancellor has produced in Labour’s 12 long years of opposition. It helps that the ‘Plan for Growth’ was so striking and ideological: not only does it create a clear dividing line with Labour, it also creates a division with the Conservative governments that preceded it. Reeves got to her feet remarking on a ‘comprehensive demolition of the last 12 years’, something Kwasi Kwarteng himself signalled repeatedly, including in his announcements that he would repeal legislation introduced in 2017 and 2021.

The shadow chancellor managed to avoid the traps that so many of her predecessors have fallen into over the past decade or so. She avoided a monotonous moral outrage which, while undoubtedly sincere, has never appealed to voters. Given the scale of the cost-of-living crisis, it would be very easy to end up sounding like Ed Miliband when he was leader, so full of doom and gloom that the electorate stop listening. Instead, she framed the statement as being about the wrong choices, putting borrowing up and leaving the profits of the energy giants untouched. She closed by telling the Chamber that ‘the Conservatives cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis, the Conservatives are the cost-of-living crisis, and the country cannot afford them any more’.

Kwarteng and Liz Truss have never used the phrase ‘trickle down’ and their supporters have spent much of this week dismissing the idea that they are proponents of trickle-down economics. Indeed, it is a phrase you only really hear the left uttering these days. And Reeves brought that straw man into the debate again today, arguing that the government had ‘decided to replace levelling up with trickling down’. The problem for the Conservatives is that they haven’t yet come up with an eye-catching phrase to explain their new economic philosophy that can compete with ‘trickle-down’. ‘Trussonomics‘ or Kwarteng talking about the government ‘getting out of the way’ won’t cut it.

Reeves has some stiff competition, though. In the minutes after she and Kwarteng had sparred, two senior Conservative backbenchers had already risen to raise serious concerns about what they’d heard from their frontbench colleague. Both Mel Stride and John Glen were supporters of Rishi Sunak’s leadership bid, so it is not a surprise that they would have qualms about the approach taken by Kwarteng.

Stride repeated his concerns that the Office for Budget Responsibility was not able to produce its normal scrutiny of this not-a-budget. John Glen, a former Treasury minister, complained that the policies for the City of London had the wrong focus and that markets were spooked. That both MPs used their slots to be so downbeat about the statement shows that the Sunak camp aren’t heading off for a period of silence and reflection. Labour will have to compete with that backbench Tory opposition in order to be heard.