Rachel Reeves looked a little surprised at the cheers from the Labour benches that greeted her as she stood to give the Commons details of the spending review. As well she might: there can’t be many places where her presence is met with such enthusiasm; the National Reserve of Mauritius perhaps? Or Reform HQ? I’m sure her continued presence in No. 11 raises some smiles there.
‘My driving purpose since I became chancellor has been to make working people in all parts of our country better off’, began Reeves. It was interesting to learn that she has a ‘driving purpose’. I had assumed that she just existed – like nitrogen or lichen – without any definite end goal. It was tragic too to learn that, having finally chosen a purpose to her existence, the Chancellor had selected something at which she is definitively rubbish.
Oratory isn’t the Chancellor’s strong suit either. If she has the presence of a noble gas then she has the delivery of a malfunctioning SatNav. In her weird staccato she rehearsed all the same old catchphrases we’ve come to know and hate: ‘£22 billion black hole’, ‘14 years’, ‘fixing the foundations’. The Prime Minister smiled a self-satisfied smirk as she did so, presumably in the manner in which the owners of Mynah birds do when they teach them to say something filthy.
Alongside telling us things we already knew – ‘we’ve secured a trade deal!’ – and repeating asinine catchphrases, the Chancellor dropped in things which were presumably meant to sound inspiring. ‘We are renewing Britain’ she droned. Why can I not escape the sense that this was a threat?
‘We’ve been crunching the numbers, looking at the assets and the liabilities’ she continued in her one-woman crusade to kill off every other member of the House of Commons by surfeit of platitudes. ‘Who’s the liability?’ came a cry from the Tory benches. The Prime Minister scowled furiously and craned his neck to see who had made the remark. He had the air of a substitute teacher on the edge of a breakdown.
Of course, none of the numbers had actually been crunched. Ironically for a woman who had made a great song and dance of turning the Office for Budget Responsibility into a Universal Arbiter of Moral Truth, the Chancellor hadn’t bothered to run any of these figures past them. She could have been reading out her Lotto numbers for all we knew.
In terms of the substance there was a little more money for defence – though mostly deckchair rearrangement – and yet more poured into the great Moloch that is the NHS. This however seemed to mostly be so she could take a lame pop at Reform. Mr Farage made a sort of hostile squirm at her as she did so. She then accused him of spending too much time in the pub. Reeves doesn’t go to pubs, presumably she never gets past the car park, being mistaken for a bollard in a wig. I suspect after her jobs tax she’s probably barred from most of them anyway.
The Labour faithful
looked glum
She ended with what she clearly thought was a stirring speech: ‘In place of chaos, I choose stability, in place of decline, I choose investment, in place of pessimism, division and defeatism, I choose national renewal’. Now we know what St. Francis of Assisi would have sounded like if he’d had access to LinkedIn.
This might just have been the effect of almost an hour of Reeves’s oratory, but the Labour faithful looked glum. I detected only two proper cheers – one for the NHS cash injection, the other for a throwaway mention of Labour’s spite tax on private schools. Save for a few of the more Stakhanovite toadies who nodded vigorously throughout, the enthusiasm was at a temperature so low it could have been measured in Kelvins.
Those of us who had still somehow clung onto our wills to live after this desultory 45 minutes were treated to a broadside by Mel Stride. Reeves was, he said, impossible to take seriously, ‘weak, weak, weak’ and ‘not an iron chancellor but a tin foil one’. This seems unfair – tin foil is actually useful.
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