George Osborne could be history by the weekend so it is easy to see why the chancellor might have paid less attention than usual to the latest figures charting progress in reducing Britain’s budget deficit.

But if the financial markets are right in their assumption that the UK will vote to stay in the EU on Thursday, it won’t be long before investors start to focus on some sticky economic problems that have not gone away while politics has been dominated by Europe.

The slow progress in reducing the UK’s budget deficit is one such problem. Actually “progress” is the wrong word since in the first two months of the 2016-17 financial year, Osborne needed to borrow 0.8% more than in the same two months of 2015-16.

For the current year as a whole, the chancellor is expecting the deficit to be cut by 23% to £55.5bn, so this has been a pretty unimpressive start.

There are a couple of mitigating factors. There was a surge in revenues in March as buy-to-let investors rushed to beat the introduction of a tougher stamp-duty regime, and the chancellor would no doubt argue that the uncertainty caused by the referendum has led to a slowdown in growth in recent months, which has fed through into weaker tax receipts.

Yet neither of these explanations are wholly convincing. Even with buoyant stamp duty receipts, the chancellor missed his deficit reduction target for last year by £2.7bn. And as yet, there has been little evidence that the economy has been affected by the referendum, with the latest news from the labour market, industry and the high street all stronger than expected.

Whatever the result on Thursday, the chances of Osborne meeting his target of running a budget surplus by the end of this parliament are diminishing.

As Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macro notes, the chancellor’s numbers only add up as a result of “very optimistic” assumptions for welfare savings and from cracking down on tax avoidance.

Osborne could well be in the position of having to ask a deeply split Conservative party to back fresh austerity measures in order to achieve his surplus. The chances of that are somewhere between slim and zero.