The mood music matters as much as the numbers, particularly since so few Britons understand how taxes actually work

It’s the mood music that matters most. The budget needs to sing “Here comes the sun” after too many grey months of grim prognosis. That hefty red book needs to tell a story of how this long and winding road leads us out of the despondency of austerity. There’s no need for fantastical “world-beating” boosterism but even so, the chancellor needs to give us a tune to carry people along with her.

The Tories and their press risk running out of Halloween frighteners by the time she gets to her feet on Wednesday, already catastrophising: “Starmer has put the final nail in the coffin for British aspiration,” (the Telegraph), “Class war” against “middle Britain” (the Daily Mail), and Rachel Reeves’s “web of lies” concealing her “dystopian plan for Britain”. On a table just outside Reeves’s office the day’s papers are laid out, headlines howling at her whenever she walks past. I suggested to an aide they be covered up to stop them getting to her. This is the same rightwing press that misleads the Tories into selecting another “small state” leader and that, with zero self-reflection on their party’s worst ever defeat, ignores the curious fact that a majority of Sun, Express, Mail, Telegraph and Times readers voted Labour rather than Tory.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist