On Monday, Rachel Reeves stood in front of a packed House of Commons and accused the Conservative government of covering up that they were overspending by £21.9bn. She announced a series of spending cuts, including cutting the winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners.

“She knows that the key to political success is to take charge of the narrative,” the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, tells Helen Pidd. “And the narrative she wants people to buy is that the Tories engaged in a scorched earth policy, left her with an almighty mess, and any tough decisions she has to take, it’s not her fault.”

Elliott argues that Reeves is taking from George Osborne’s 2010 playbook.

“All incoming governments try to take tough decisions early on in a parliament, because that gets them out of the way quickly, and they hope that voters will have forgotten by the time the next election rolls around. So each government comes in and blames the other lot for the tough decisions that they’ve got to take.”

But could Labour have taken a different path?

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