Downing Street’s grip on the agenda has unspooled so badly that yesterday we had two news conferences from Opposition parties reacting to a Budget that has not yet been delivered.
Kemi Badenoch applied an extra coat of red lipstick to denounce the Chancellor’s yet-even-to-be-run-off-the-office-printer Budget speech. The Tory leader summoned the Press to an elegant library on Carlton House Terrace. Excellent shortbread biscuits.
The rest of the event was built on air: assertion built on anticipation. Reaching back foggily to the Latin lessons of my boyhood, we were dealing in the future-perfect tense.
Mrs Badenoch averred that the Budget-still-to-come will have bankrupted the nation. The International Monetary Fund will not have had enough loot to bail us out of trouble.
All the taxes Rachel Reeves will have imposed will be devoured by higher welfare costs that will have arisen from scrapping the two-child benefits tax.
By heck this was complicated. Worse than chess. We sketch writers licked our pencils and dutifully made note of these future developments. Quantum physics, the branch of science concerned with time travel, has a lot to answer for.
Even Doctor Who might have scratched his curls and asked ‘remind me, has this actually occurred or are we still in speculation territory?’
Reform’s Nigel Farage held a simultaneous press conference at Church House. Mr Farage hopped out of his Tardis and gave Ms Reeves a sustained biffing for things she might be about to do.
Boris Johnson used to be accused of retaining his cake while eating it. This was pre-cakeism: eating a Victoria sponge before it had even been placed in the oven.
That’s what happens when Treasury spin doctors, or whoever, leak all sort of possible Budget details to the media.
Mrs Badenoch presented her prophetic remarks alongside Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride. Uncle Melvyn has come on commendably in recent months. He has perfected the pose, when listening to his leader, of silent, jaw-grinding relish. While Mrs Badenoch was talking, Sir Mel sucked on his lips and gazed delightedly into the middle-distance. He could have been a man chewing a particularly delicious salted caramel.
Sir Mel and Mrs B seem actually to like one another. This is by no means a given between party leaders and their economics spokesmen. Tony Blair could not abide Gordon Brown. Mrs Thatcher was often at war with her chancellors.
Sir Keir Starmer now treats Ms Reeves like a diseased vivisection-lab mouse. If he watches her closely, it is solely out of interest to see how long she can last.
Mrs Badenoch, a punchier piece of work than she was a few weeks ago, was at her liveliest when attacking two individuals: Mr Farage and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally. It is not often that those two find themselves in the same canoe.
Someone asked about Reform’s plan to balance the books by making EU nationals pay more for their healthcare here. Mrs Badenoch, referring to Nigel: ‘That man doesn’t know what he’s talking about!’
She was only marginally kinder about Archbishop Mullally, who has in the past supported bigger benefits handouts.
In a cricket report you might say that Mrs Badenoch sent down a bouncer to the Archbishop in her first over at the crease. We must hope she is wearing a box.
At the Reform event Mr Farage performed his act of sooth-saying alongside the party’s policy chief, Zia Yusuf. Old Nigel seemed tired. There were a lot of ‘franklys’, ‘I means’ and ‘y’knows’. He kept repeating the word ‘very’.
Ms Reeves was not just ‘out of her depth’ but ‘absolutely hopelessly out of her depth’. At one point he said ‘time and time and time and time again’.
Young Yusuf opted for a loftier blether. He dilated, with a certain emphatic weariness, on ‘line items on the welfare budget’, ‘data points’, ‘deltas’ and‘non-linear fashion’. When blokes in the pub talk to me like that I generally conclude they are full of wind.
