Rachel Reeves will be hoping this Budget buys her some time

Finally, after weeks – even months – of hearing about it, we’re about to find out what’s really in this year’s budget.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will argue about what she says are “fair and necessary options”.

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The emphasis of the Chancellor’s address will be on three cuts – cutting the cost of living, cutting NHS waiting lists and cutting government debt as a proportion of national income.

Doing so would move taxes in the other direction – and the problem is that imposing taxes increases the cost of living for those with higher tax bills.

Reeves will argue that there will be more to it, such as reducing some rail fares, that will help address the cost of living for some people.

The problem of not increasing income tax rates means that other smaller taxes on particular groups of people will increase, which could lead to noisy, coordinated protests as we saw from many farmers after the announcement about their inheritance taxes last year.

Every year a wild recipe of lots of briefings, many spoonfuls of speculation and lots of leaks is presented.

But this year has been different: the budget in its last breath of autumn has meant that all of the above has been served up with ever-increasing frequency, as the children were still on their summer holidays.

On top of all this, the Chancellor himself has chosen to engage in pre-Budget public conversations more often than ever before.

There is an underlying reason for all this: Rachel Reeves, the Prime Minister and the rest of the government have long known that this is a historic moment for them.

Opinion polls show that this still relatively new government is highly, highly unpopular, and the Prime Minister and Chancellor are even more unpopular.

The economy is faltering, the cost of living is rising for millions, and ministers from the Prime Minister on down admit that the “change” they were elected to promise is not happening fast enough for many people.

Against that backdrop, Labor MPs are growing increasingly uneasy. They can feel the party’s current unpopularity in their bones, in their inboxes and in their conversations with their constituents.

“This is the middle of the end,” one told me, predicting that this would be Sir Keir Starmer and Reeves’ last budget.

“I am on a four-year march to the guillotine,” says another man, fearing defeat in the next general election.

Even the most loyal, least likely person to sound negative speaks like this in private.

No wonder Reeves had to say out loud that she was looking forward to next year’s budget and the one after that – chancellors have to do that only when some people think it is unlikely.

I’m struggling to find any Labor MP who would personally try to argue that the weeks leading up to this Budget have been anything other than a mess.

It’s so messed up that it has led some people to argue that the idea of ​​an annual budget should be scrapped altogether.

Relations between the government and its backbenchers are at worst, at best, strained.

Deep unpopularity in the country and irritable Labor MPs are the lens through which both the countdown to this Budget and its outcome should be viewed.

The possibility of a leadership challenge before Christmas going down so badly was likely to prompt some of those loyal to the Prime Minister to tell some journalists that Sir Keir would fight any such challenge.

If the Chancellor had broken Labour’s manifesto promise not to raise income tax rates, an attempt was made to make the case for it a few weeks earlier due to the possibility of a rebellion among Labor MPs and the decision was reconsidered a week or so later.

It is almost impossible for Labor MPs to defend the clearly visible wavering indecision.

But the lack of heat cuts both ways.

“The Parliamentary Labor Party is huge and naive,” one government figure tells me.

“They want to avoid bargaining and we have to tell them that we are in government, you can’t do that.”

The best Rachel Reeves can hope for is that this is a Budget she can meet without making her and Sir Keir Starmer’s position even worse – and it buys her some time and some patience from her own MPs and the country.

But they both know that they don’t have that much patience.