There's an old Bernard Levin line

He asked, rhetorically, whether it is better to have a tombstone marked “He always kept his word” or “He always acted from the best intentions”. He, as with Bernard Weatherill a couple of decades later, plumped for the former as being the more desirable.

In 2020 Sunak said he was changing the definition of RPI at the behest of the UK Statistics Authority to make it identical to CPIH, the consumer prices index adjusted for housing costs, with the change coming in from 2030.

RPI has long been discredited as a measure of the cost of living because of a methodological flaw in the way it is calculated and other drawbacks. It typically comes in at around 0.8-1 percentage point higher than CPIH each year.

Well, yes, except the bonds were sold on the RPI definition, not the CPIH. The government therefore collected the money at the price connected with RPI, not CPIH.

The Treasury has argued that there is no case for compensation because linkers would still be linked to “RPI,” just a differently defined RPI.

So, it appears that government fails that Levin/Weatherill test then.

So much for putting our faith in the words and promises of government…..they can’t even keep their word about which type of inflation they’re going to charge to protect us from.