How Rishi Sunak outshone Corbyn’s five years in one speech

If Jeremy Corbyn had been saving his energy by giving a poor performance at PMQs, he wasn’t saving it for his Budget response. He sounded bored, almost as though he too is fed up of waiting for the Labour leadership contest to trundle to an end so that he can pack off and not have to respond to economic statements. Beside him, John McDonnell looked a little envious that the final big fiscal event of the duo’s time at the top of the party was the one Corbyn got to respond to, rather than the Shadow Chancellor. He even failed to notice that the debate was being chaired – as it always is – by the deputy speaker Eleanor Laing, and spent much of his speech referring to ‘Mr Speaker’.

His bored, bumbling performance at the dispatch box was shown up still further by the speech that came before. Rishi Sunak has only been Chancellor for a few weeks, yet he offered a statement to the Commons that was impressive on its own terms, not merely as a debut. It was forceful and passionate, and disciplined in its political messaging. This is no mean feat given the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus outbreak. In one speech, Sunak managed to make a better pitch to be a future Prime Minister than Corbyn has in the past five years. 

It was also hard for Corbyn to make his usual complaints about the Conservatives being the mean penny pinchers when this Budget has moved the governing party into the traditional high-spending territory of the Labour Party. They have long been talking up how they are the true workers’ party – ever since 2012 when Robert Halfon started campaigning for this as a tag-line, in fact – but now they have the majority and the confidence to start spending like one too. 

There is now just under a month left of Corbyn’s leadership, so it is tempting to disregard what he said as pointless. But in that time, Labour will be picking its Budget battles. Corbyn’s principal objections were on sick pay – both in terms of workers’ eligibility for it and its level – the contradiction between investing in roads and aiming for net zero carbon emissions, and spending on public health. We will have to wait for John McDonnell’s briefing to journalists this afternoon and his own speech in the Budget debate to get a sense of what Labour is going to do about it. And not long after that, the pair will finally be out of their jobs.