A telling moment in today’s urgent question on the IMF’s economic outlook came when Angela Eagle pointed out the dearth of Tories who’d turned up to hear the Treasury defend its performance. She said:

Despite the minister’s bluster, the benches opposite are empty. They haven’t come in in large numbers to defend the government’s economic, er, results, have they?

Eagle argued that this was because the IMF had offered a ‘devastating forecast’ which ‘laid bare the economic incompetence’.