Government borrowing is going through the roof. The figures on Friday were awful. 

It borrowed £23.3billion in May, way above the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of £17.7billion and the second month overshooting the target.

We are two months into the new financial year and so far the Government has borrowed £46.3billion, £8.9billion more than the same period in 2025 and £7.7billion more than the OBR expected.

So, Andy Burnham, as and when the next stage of your career unfolds, you are likely to find the country is even more in hock than it was in September last year, when you said: ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.’

Already the UK has to pay more to borrow than any other major economy, in recent months up to half a percentage point more than the US for ten-year debt. 

It is called, rather rudely, the moron premium, and the markets expect it to rise further were Mr Burnham to become PM.

To be fair, he did clarify those remarks and say that he would stick by the OBR’s fiscal rules.

But the problem there is twofold. First, on the basis of April and May’s public accounts, the Government is already on course to break those rules. Second, the rules aren’t tight enough anyway to deliver sustainable finances.

What’s gone wrong? It’s mostly on the spending side. Tax revenue in April and May was close to forecasts. 

We may not like higher taxes and firms may cut back on staff because of higher labour costs. But the economy hasn’t fallen off a cliff and we taxpayers are stumping up the extra cash. 

Government spending, by contrast, is £4billion over budget for two main reasons. One is that general spending, including on social benefits, is higher than forecast. The other and more important reason is that debt interest has shot up, thanks to higher-than-expected inflation.

Debt interest was £11.7billion, the highest ever in any May.

About a quarter of our national debt is index-linked, and to the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation, which is usually higher than the Consumer Price Index.

Last month the RPI was up 3.1 per cent against 2.8 per cent for the CPI. If the RPI is higher than the OBR expected, which as a result of the war in the Middle East it is, the OBR has to account for that to balance the books.

Maybe there will be a peace settlement, which will bring inflation back down and everything will look hunky-dory, but right now the inflation outlook is pretty bad.

In any case, and this is the thing that really troubles the bond markets, the OBR’s predictions all rely on a sharp improvement in public finances in the final two years of its forecasts.

That isn’t the fault of the OBR. It’s the way the system is set up. It has to base its projections on what the Government says it will do, however unrealistic that is. 

So if this Government says it will make big departmental spending cuts in the run-up to the next election, as in effect it has done, the OBR must accept that – even if the rest of us know this is nuts.

So what happens next? It’s for the political experts to tell us how all this will unfold, but assuming come the autumn Andy Burnham is indeed PM with a new Chancellor, they will inherit a fiscal disaster. 

Forget about the make-believe £22billion black hole that Rachel Reeves claimed to have discovered after taking office. That was a stunt to justify the tax increases she always wanted to make.

There is a real black hole – and it is a vastly bigger one. Our public finances are a slow-motion car crash.

Andy Burnham has good people as advisers. They include Jim O’Neill, the ex-Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRICs to describe the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, predicting their growing importance to the world economy 25 years ago. That has been hugely influential.

There’s Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, whom I also admire.

And there’s Richard Hughes, who was head of the OBR. So top-of-the-range economists.

However, they can’t change those fiscal numbers, which, as I say, are dreadful.