The chancellor’s Budget speech has been preceded by much speculation about whether Rishi Sunak would break a manifesto pledge and raise taxes. Before the Conservative Party was re-elected in 2019, it pledged to maintain a ‘triple lock’ against raising income tax, national insurance or VAT. What seems remarkable to me is that anyone would expect such a promise to hold in the wake of the vast spending demanded by the pandemic.

It brings to mind the popular meme that shows a cartoon dog, in a hat, calmly drinking coffee in a blazing building. “This is fine,” the dog says, as his flesh smoulders.

Well, things are not fine and we should expect politicians to react accordingly, not to hold onto promises long rendered obsolete.

Besides, parties are not actually elected to government on the basis of manifesto commitments. I imagine the number of people who diligently read and compare all relevant manifestos before an election is roughly equal to the number of people in paid work as political reporters. Probably slightly smaller.

“Behaving as if estimates are immutable promises will simply make matters worse”

In reality, most people vote for the parties they always back, or to remove parties that have screwed up, or to keep in place parties that seem to be doing OK. Actual pledges rarely come into it.

The same dose of realism needs to apply to infrastructure projects. Late last year, the National Audit Office published the findings of a study into major project failures in which it outlined why government programmes “often encounter difficulties, taking longer and costing more than planned, and not delivering the intended aims, with significant and high-profile consequences”.

The report laid out a series of recommendations, including the need to actually understand the limits of forecasting, when it comes to estimates of cost and schedule; the importance of transparency and honesty, especially when things start to go wrong; and the vital importance of being able to manage change.

In other words, it is counterproductive to approach a major project like Crossrail or HS2 without acknowledging how much of the programme is guesswork at the outset. Behaving as if estimates are immutable promises will simply make matters worse.

We will soon publish a look into how much harder infrastructure delivery becomes in the face of shifting goals, political dithering and lack of transparency. It may be a forlorn hope to imagine that politicians will cease to dither. But perhaps we can hope that the pandemic may have underscored the importance of reacting promptly to reality.

When your house is on fire, it’s not fine.