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Roughly one in five Brits have made what they considered a ‘critical mistake’ at work. While it may be nothing compared to the mistake at the OBR this week, which published Rachel Reeves’s budget before she had announced it, what is seen as career-ending now? Lydia Spencer-Elliott reports
Friday 28 November 2025 06:42 GMTComments
CloseAwkward moment Susanna Reid flusters Rachel Reeves in Budget grilling
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Sweaty palms. A sinking stomach. Hundreds of new Slack notifications. When you mess up to epic proportions at work, it can feel similar to having heart failure. Which is why, a Whitehall insider said they were sure someone “quite junior” at the Office for Budget Responsibility was having “the worst day of their working life” after Rachel Reeve’s budget was accidentally published 40 minutes early on the organisation’s website this week.
While it has since emerged that an “external person” may have been responsible, it remains that someone somewhere wasn’t doing their job properly. The release of market-sensitive information saw bond prices and sterling start to shift as billions of pounds of trades were executed in the wake of the news. The yield on 10-year UK government bonds dropped by four basis points, while the pound jumped 0.3 per cent. “I think I need a red box, I can deliver the Budget now in the studio… It tells you all the measures,” the BBC political editor Chris Mason said on Politics Live, while Reeves glanced down worriedly at her phone in the Commons.
The ODR had egg on its face. Chair Richard Hughes said he was “personally mortified”. It feels almost as bad as the recently robbed Louvre Museum’s password for its video surveillance being “Louvre”.
Roughly one in five Brits have made what they considered a “critical mistake” at work. These range from hitting “reply all” on an email, leaving sensitive documents on their desk, or forgetting to mute themselves while saying something inappropriate on a work call. Small fry, compared to, say, getting your organisation sued for $1bn by the US president because of an error in an editing suite.
Charlotte Davies, a career expert for online networking platform LinkedIn, says making mistakes in the workplace is “completely normal” and something experienced by even the most “accomplished leaders”. Taking in the recent cock-ups from the BBC to the OBR and Angela Rayner underpaying stamp duty on a property when she was minister for housing, this we know.
Davies recommends the best way to get over a workplace mistake is to recognise what went wrong, turn your misstep into a lesson, and share what you’ve realised with your colleagues once you’re out the other side.
“It can be uncomfortable to be vulnerable with colleagues, but in most cases it can open up a discussion about those moments that haven’t gone right, which everyone can learn from,” she says.
“I’ve made many f*** ups,” says 29-year-old Melissa, who’s been in her job as a qualified property lawyer for a matter of months. “Most recently, I didn’t realise that a client owed nearly £4,000 worth of tax on a property transfer and had to tell them after completion to cough up the cash,” she admits. “It could have been much worse, but the client wasn’t exactly strapped for cash, so they could afford it,” she adds.
”I just had to do a bit of grovelling – but I was definitely sweating.”
There are many more tales of bad days in the office. I’m told a story by the close friend of a cardiographer, who read a patient’s data wrong and almost killed them by messing up the timing and momentarily stopping their heart. “I don’t think it was actually her fault, but I don’t think she’ll want to talk about it,” they add of the adrenaline-spiking ordeal that’s still only whispered about.
Over on Reddit, one man who worked in a builder’s merchant says he took credit card details for a large order over the phone, which later turned out to be fraud. Although the member of staff was supposed to get the guys who picked it up to fill in paperwork to identify them, the yard crew didn’t follow the process. Yet, he was given the chop. “I got fired and everyone else got to keep their jobs,” he wrote beneath a post titled “What one mistake ended your career?”
The most famous career-ending mistake has to be that of Gerald Ratner. When the former CEO of Ratners made a joke that his company’s products were “total” crap, £500m was wiped off the company’s value in days. After being forced to resign, “Doing a Ratner” became shorthand for self-destruction at work.
With an OBR internal investigation ongoing, Hughes has said he’ll continue to lead the watchdog unless he loses the confidence of the Treasury committee or the chancellor, which Reeves’s spokesperson has assured him he has not. When asked by the BBC flat out if he’d resign for the OBR error, Hughes said: “I’ve given you a statement, that is all I have to say.”
We might all mess up, but you probably wouldn’t get away with that response on a bad day in the everyman’s office.
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