They think it’s all OBR – it is now. Political journalists should always be wary of that word ‘inevitable’. But from the moment it was revealed on Wednesday that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had accidentally leaked details of the Budget, it always seemed likely that this story only had one ending. Richard Hughes, the watchdog’s chairman, has tonight fallen on his sword and accepted responsibility for the data leak. It came two hours after a damning report was published into last week’s data breach, calling the incident the ‘worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR’.

In a pithy letter of resignation, Hughes defended the OBR’s work but said that in order to allow ‘the organisation that I have loved leading for the past five years to quickly move on’, he has decided to q

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