The Cabinet Secretary is being economical with the truth. That’s not a euphemism for saying Britain’s top civil servant is lying; rather, that he is literally restricting the amount of information voters have about the economy.

Last week, Sir Mark Sedwill prevented the Treasury from publishing its official costings of Labour policies in the future.

Today he stopped the Office of Budget Responsibility from publishing a forecast update that, because of reclassifications, would show higher projected borrowing in the present.

Sir Mark’s motives are very honourable — he is trying to keep the civil service impartial. We wish him well, but we fear he will fail.

The Treasury’s work is already in Tory hands. They are planning to leak it as “the figures that John McDonnell tried to suppress”. Who cares about the professional confidentiality of officials when there’s an election to be won?

As voters we won’t learn anything we didn’t know. Labour are planning to borrow and spend a lot more — a whopping £400 billion more over the decade, much of it upfront, on a “national transformation fund”.

In a previous age, the Tories would make hay with the Labour magic money tree. But this Conservative leadership is also picking the fruit from its branches.

Boris Johnson’s attitude to the public finances is simple: I’m in charge, and if I don’t spend it someone else will.

No 10 wants to make billions of pounds worth of commitments on spending and tax cuts during this campaign. The big idea for the Tory manifesto is social care. That might send a shiver down the spine of Conservative candidates who remember the fiasco of the 2017 manifesto pledge to make the well-off pay for their care.

But this Downing Street has found a different group of people to pay for it: you, the general public.

Get ready for plans for a national care service, funded out of general taxation like the NHS. It’s a big expansion of the state — and an idea the Tories attacked when Labour proposed it a decade ago.

Debt danger

Number 11 is doing a heroic job trying to restrain its neighbours, but they too want to spend more. In an echo of his shadow, Sajid Javid announced today his own £100 billion “fund” for a “decade of renewal”.

That’s code for higher capital spending — on the grounds that one-off commitments to roads and hospital buildings can be turned off more quickly than recurring spending on things like welfare and staffing.

All this borrowing by the Tories further shatters the fiscal rules that Philip Hammond established to constrain Theresa May, so his successor is proposing new rules. There will be a current budget balance over a three-year horizon.

This is sensible and very similar to the rule the Coalition government set out in 2010 — but it doesn’t stop debt rising. So the Chancellor is also promising public sector net investment won’t exceed three per cent of GDP, and a “debt interest” rule.

Neither in practice offer much constraint. Three per cent is a high number historically, and if the cost of debt interest was to rocket from its current low level, then any government would have to “reassess its borrowing plans” because with debt this high we’d be in a full-blown fiscal crisis.

The Chancellor also says today that “debt will be lower at the end of the next parliament than it will be at the start”. This sounds important.

It looks similar to the other rule on debt set out in 2010. But the key here will be look at the classifications. Until now, the Treasury has always excluded the balance sheet of the Bank of England, with its massive quantitative easing programme. If that is included, it’s a way of pretending that government debt is falling when it’s actually rising.

Markets will see straight through this kind of thing. So why are the Conservatives going through these contortions?

Because they want to borrow more, while preserving their dividing line with Labour.

The risk is that they blur a distinction that should be clear: yes the Tories want to spend billions more; but Labour want to spend a great deal more billions than that. That’s the real choice.

What isn’t a choice is that the ordinary taxpayer will pick up the bill. Because all borrowing is just higher taxes deferred.

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