Rachel Reeves will not be investigated over pre-budget briefing, FCA says
The UK’s financial regulator has decided not to immediately investigate Rachel Reeves and the Treasury over pre-budget briefings but left the door open for further examination of what the Conservatives claimed amounted to market manipulation,In a letter addressed to the chair of the Treasury committee, Meg Hillier, the the chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the regulator had turned down requests by politicians including the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, to open an inquiry into briefings made before last week’s announcement by the chancellor,Nikhil Rathi said the FCA had “not commenced an enforcement investigation” into potential market abuse, but added that the regulator would consider the findings of a Treasury inquiry into pre-budget leaks,On Wednesday, the Treasury minister James Murray said the department’s permanent secretary, James Bowler, would review “security processes” to inform future events,He said the inquiry had the “full support” of Reeves and the “whole Treasury team”.
The FCA said: “We have requested details of this work and that the outcome, including of the inquiry into any leak of market-sensitive or inside information relating to the budget, is shared with us so we can consider as appropriate.”This year’s budget was preceded by numerous stories about what was being considered, including the revelation in the Financial Times days beforehand that Reeves had abruptly dropped a plan to raise income tax rates.Allies of the chancellor said the U-turn had come about because of improved forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, but the OBR later clarified it had not updated its forecasts for two weeks.The confusion around Reeves’s decisions and the competing explanations as to why they were taken has led to accusations that Treasury officials deliberately misled reporters in an attempt to keep UK borrowing costs low.Stride said this week that Treasury’s “leaks and spin” had led to market speculation being “rife, and the gilt markets volatile”.
He added in his letter to the FCA: “It seems increasingly clear that the chancellor has been giving an inaccurate picture of the economic and fiscal context and this appears to be driven by political considerations.”However, Rathi said in the letter that the core purpose of the regulator’s market abuse rules was to ensure a level playing field and confidence in markets.“Its purpose is not to make judgments on political discourse, even though that discourse may on occasion have an impact on markets,” he said.“How the government publicly communicates its position in advance of a fiscal event or similar is a matter for parliament through its accountability mechanisms.”Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionControversies around the budget have also ensnared the OBR.
Its chair, Richard Hughes, resigned on Monday, after the Treasury watchdog mistakenly published a key document before the chancellor delivered her speech.Hughes said he took “full responsibility” for the failure to handle sensitive information, after damning internal inquiry that also found that this was not the first time the OBR had inadvertently published budget documents early.It emerged that its reports had also been accessed early in March 2025 before the spring statement, although no action was taken as a result of the breach.In his letter, Rathi said the FCA was considering the OBR’s report into the early release of the Economic and Fiscal Outlook document.He added that the regulator welcomed the statement from the OBR that it “would cooperate fully with the FCA”.
A Traitors cloak, Britpop Trumps and a very arty swearbox: it’s the 2025 Culture Christmas gift guide!
Put some artful oomph into your festive season with our bumper guide, featuring everything from a satanic South Park shirt to Marina Abramović’s penis salt and pepper potsThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Is there an overly sweary person in your life? Do you have a friend who’s utterly bereft without The Traitors? Would anyone you know like to shake up their cocktail-making? And do you ever wish your neighbours’ doormat was, well, a bit more kinky?The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link
Comedian Judi Love: ‘I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it’
Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best
Fran Lebowitz: ‘Hiking is the most stupid thing I could ever imagine’
I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems
The Guide #219: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions
I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich
From Christy to Neil Young: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
ChristyOut now Based on the life of the American boxer Christy Martin (nickname: the Coal Miner’s Daughter), this sports drama sees Sydney Sweeney Set aside her conventionally feminine America’s sweetheart aesthetic and don the mouth guard and gloves of a professional fighter.Blue MoonOut now Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise) reteams with one of his favourite actors, Ethan Hawke, for a film about Lorenz Hart, the songwriter who – in addition to My Funny Valentine and The Lady Is a Tramp – also penned the lyrics to the eponymous lunar classic. Also starring Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley.PillionOut now Harry Melling plays the naive sub to Alexander Skarsgård’s biker dom in this kinky romance based on the 1970s-set novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, here updated to a modern-day setting, and with some success: it bagged the screenplay prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.Laura Mulvey’s Big Screen ClassicsThroughout DecemberRecent recipient of a BFI Fellowship, the film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in a seminal 1975 essay, and thus transformed film criticism
Susan Loppert obituary
My partner Susan Loppert, who has died aged 81, was the moving force behind the development of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts in the 1990s. This pioneering programme, which Susan directed for 10 years (1993-2003), was a hugely innovative and imaginative project to bring the visual and performing arts into the heart of London’s newest teaching hospital.As Susan wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2006, this was not about “the odd Monet reproduction or carols at Christmas … but 2,000 original works of art hung in the vast spaces of the stunning atrial building” as well as in clinics, wards and treatment areas – many of them specially commissioned. And on top of this, full-length operas, an annual music festival, Indian dancers in residence, and workshops by artists from poets to puppeteers.Susan was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, to Phyllis (nee Orkin, and known as “Inkey” because of her dark hair), a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist, and her husband Eric Loppert, a manager
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