Exclusive: Chancellor says she made ‘fair and necessary choices’ in budget, and was unwilling to make cuts

Britain’s wealthy must shoulder the burden of paying to rebuild the UK’s “creaky” public services, Rachel Reeves has said, as she warned Labour MPs that leadership speculation was bad for the country.

The chancellor said she had opted to increase taxes by £26bn in this week’s budget to improve schools, hospitals and infrastructure, rejecting calls to “cut our cloth accordingly” after a downgrade in productivity forecasts.