Few of us are at our best before breakfast but Rachel Reeves’ early-morning speech was a horror show.
This unusual event was apparently intended to ‘set context’ for her coming Budget. She would speak directly to breakfast television viewers. You dread to imagine what they, more accustomed to celebrity trivia and consumer news, made of the wan prophet of perdition honking at them like a malfunctioning cyborg.
Grim was hardly the word. She exuded ruin. Optimism was almost entirely absent. Here was Mistress Tribulation, come to stir calamity’s cauldron, yet simultaneously terrified.Only a very hard onlooker will not have wondered: ‘Is she unwell? Has she not been sleeping? Should she take a break?’
Down the cathode ray tube shimmered a yellowish, unsmiling presence. Her eyeballs were stuck at the top of their sockets. Her fringe was scraped low. She licked her teeth and pursed her lips and within a minute was talking about ‘the supply side of the economy’ and the ‘productivity puzzle’. The audience may have wondered ‘can’t we get back to Richard with the showbiz gossip?’
I am not enough of a fashion analyst to tell you if her plum-coloured jacket and pale shirt had a bleaching effect on her face. How washed-out she looked. Almost embalmed. Her skull appeared elongated into the shape of a coffin. Debt, despair, doom. Coming up next, folks: higher taxes. Whoever styled her hairdo may have had Herman Munster in mind.
The economy was in a mess. We got that. Voters may also have gathered that it was now in a worse mess than when Labour took office last year. Ms Reeves insisted that others were to blame. Brexit, George Osborne, Liz Truss, Donald Trump, V. Putin, forecasters. Everyone else. Anyone else but she and Sir Keir Starmer.
If you are going to play such a game it is probably better to do so in a conversational, subtle way, maybe sitting at a desk with soft lighting. That’s how Harold Wilson would have done it. He would have couched it in everyday terms. He would have said something like ‘now look, we all know things have been a bit tricky but we’re going to be okay because Uncle Harold knows what he’s doing’.
Ms Reeves is incapable of such intimacy. Instead she stood bolt upright in front of garish lighting, gulping and spluttering, rolling her eyes at the ceiling, jabbering in a staccato manner. The setting of the Downing Street media suite, flanked by Union Jacks, just screamed ‘EMERGENCY’.
‘This isn’t about relitigating old choices,’ she insisted. Sorry, that is precisely what it was. She tried leaning on the lectern but soon gave it up as a bad idea. When she gave brief mention to ‘the brightness of the future’ she smiled as if gripped by nausea. The BBC’s Chris Mason asked her about her ill-fated personal property dealings. Her right eye started moving of its own volition. That eyeball seemed to be heading for the door. And who could blame it?
After this defensive, forlorn speech – the performance of a lemon-squirted oyster – we reporters stampeded to the Royal Academy of Engineering where an energised Kemi Badenoch also made a speech about the economy.
She spoke of tax cuts, lower public spending, job creation and the current madness of 5,000 people a day signing off work for sickness benefits. Mrs Badenoch dismissed the Chancellor’s speech as ‘one long waffle bomb’.
She felt that Ms Reeves had ‘given up trying’.
Opposition is, as Labour proved in the last parliament, a lot easier than being in government. Even so, Mrs Badenoch’s new-found confidence was striking. ‘Those of us who are adults have a duty to act like it,’ she growled.
She also vented an unfashionable belief that ‘effort and work should lead to reward’.
The Tories are doing just as badly as Labour in opinion polls yet the difference between Mrs Badenoch’s smoky composure and Ms Reeves’ bruised, luminous defeatism could not have been starker.
