Rachel Reeves has been forced to deny lying to the country about the state of the public finances as she clashed with Trevor Phillips on Sky News.

Treasury officials repeatedly suggested in the run-up to the Budget that there was a black hole of up to £30bn in the government’s sums.

Reeves herself even called an emergency Downing Street press conference at which she painted a gloomy picture of the state of the economy and warned voters their taxes would need to go up.

But figures released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) financial watchdog on Friday showed that gap did not exist and that the chancellor actually had a surplus of £4.2bn.

The Tories have accused Reeves of misleading voters because she wanted to put up taxes to increase welfare spending and called on K

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