THE Day of Reckoning is at hand. Recompense will follow us for the rest of our days and be visited on our grandchildren and their descendants.

That is the bleak, biblical background to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s report today to the Commons on the desperate state of the nation’s finances.

He will have much sympathy. The Government did not wish Covid-19 on the UK. It needed the pestilence like a hole in the head, especially with Brexit looming. It is responsible for the vast bulk of possibly a £500bn budget deficit facing us this financial year.

That is well over treble the £153bn deficit left by Gordon Brown in 2010. Ten years later, we were still trying to balance the nation’s books when the virus struck. And it took us 50 years to pay off World War Two debt.

Pressure will grow on Boris Johnson, warns Sir Bernard Ingham, when Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivers his Spending Review later today.

Many will, of course, argue that Government incompetence has inflated the coronavirus bill. Certainly there  have been costly errors or failings such as the supply of personal protection equipment and the disaster in old folks’ homes.

But any government would be damned if they did and damned if they didn’t when combating an unknown virus without a vaccine.

Let’s leave recrimination until the eventual official inquiry has reported. Today we must face the harsh consequences of trying to defeat the virus and keep the economy and jobs afloat with subsidies.

Boris Johnson must face facts over public finances – Bernard Ingham