Spare a thought for Rachel Reeves. After last week’s mini-meltdown during prime minister’s questions, the chancellor is now condemned to spend the next year grinning manically every time she’s out and about in public. Having a bad day at the office? GRIN. Had a row with the kids? GRIN. Now there is no escape.
To make it worse, you now get endless colleagues patting you on the shoulder and looking you deep in the eyes as they ask if you’re OK. When you just want to be left alone. GRIN. Everything is fine. Couldn’t be more normal. Sometimes, it’s no fun being a politician.
So Rachel entered the Commons alongside Keir Starmer for this week’s PMQs grinning wildly. Of course she did. And it must have taken all Kemi Badenoch’s self-control not to have made fun of the chancellor. She might know it’s a bad look for a party leader to use someone’s mental health against them, but generally speaking she can’t help herself. Kemi is hardwired to kick an opponent when she’s down.
But well done Kemi for doing the right thing. Unfortunately for her that was about the only thing she did get right. Not that Starmer himself was on sparkling form. The chaos of the welfare bill has clearly ground him down. It was more that Kemi felt a bit distracted herself. As though her heart wasn’t fully in it either. Semi-detached Kemi. This PMQs was just another chore to be ticked off the list. One to forget for all concerned.
“Labour said there would be no more rises in income tax, personal national insurance and VAT,” she began. “Is that a promise you intend to keep?”
“Yes,” replied Starmer, before sitting straight down again. One down, five to go.
Kemi seemed surprised by the brevity and raced back to her notes. Not a good idea. Because her next move was to accuse Starmer of giving in to the resident doctors. Keir looked understandably confused. Largely because he hasn’t given in. The government and the doctors are in a standoff. Kemi had another go. Back to tax. Was Labour going to freeze the tax thresholds yet again?
This wasn’t quite the slam dunk she thought it was. Partly because no prime minister is going to write a budget in advance, but mainly because there is no one in the country who ever imagined that Labour was going to raise the thresholds. The Tories hadn’t done so for years and had committed themselves to maintaining the freeze had they won the last election. So this was hardly a big reveal. Every government in recent years has counted on fiscal drag to balance the books.
At this point, Starmer went to his own default setting and accused Badenoch of talking the country down. Which would have been music to Emmanuel Macron, who is over in the UK for a state visit. The French president is desperate for the UK to reduce the pull factor for migrants coming to this country. So what more could he ask for than Kemi to tell everyone how rubbish things really were? “Don’t come here. Nothing works. We’re all ever more broke than you.” She could empty the beaches in northern France in minutes.
Kemi now turned to a wealth tax. “This is something that will affect all our constituents,” she said. Er … hello? Unless I’m missing something, the proposed wealth tax only comes into effect on people with assets in excess of £10m. Which, by my reckoning, rather excludes most constituents.
Though perhaps Kemi knows something the rest of us don’t. Maybe Saffron Walden is wall-to-wall multimillionaires. But here’s something Kemi definitely doesn’t know. A wealth tax is actually quite popular with most voters. They like the idea of the super-rich paying a bit more. Even if Tory donors don’t.
We ended the leaders clash where we so often do on days like these where neither Kemi nor Keir can really be bothered to engage. In an unsatisfactory stalemate. Kemi claiming the Tories had left the country with a booming economy – she still hasn’t worked out why her party only won 121 seats at the last election – and everything was now shit. Keir insisting everything had been shit and that the good times were back again.
I couldn’t help feeling that both their good times had rather passed me by. I must have been asleep. At times, it feels as if no party is prepared to grasp the demographic realities of the fiscal situation.
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Sitting near the back during these exchanges were Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock. A new two-man party of the Reform Recovery Group. Cast adrift by Nigel Farage. Left to contemplate their inner futility. Though it’s possible James has other things on his mind. At present he finds himself in hot water over Covid loans.
Labour’s John Slinger was not going to let McMurdock’s appearance in the Commons go unremarked. Was it not the case that anyone who was guilty of extracting Covid loans under false pretences should feel the full force of the law? Or perhaps under Lord Leveson’s recommendations, 40% of the force of the law. Starmer needed no second invitation. There was “no place for con artists and grifters in public life”.
Cue the speaker. Lindsay Hoyle may be a bit of a bore at heart, more interested in securing himself a peerage than the day job, but he is occasionally capable of genius comic timing. All the better for probably being accidental. Because a nanosecond after Starmer had talked of con artists and grifters, he chose to introduce Nigel Farage.
Not that anyone got to properly hear Nige amid first the general laughter and then the barracking. Poor Lee Anderson became quite overwhelmed that his leader was not getting heard and demanded that the independent MP Iqbal Mohamed shut up. The noise wasn’t a great look. Nige thrives on being the voice of the people, the man whom the establishment want to silence. Sometimes, Westminster does Nige’s job for him.
But what Farage had seemed to say was that he didn’t want anyone slagging off Brexit. It had been a great idea, was still a great idea even though it was a disaster, and could he tell Macron to sink a few more boats and stop being so arrogant.
What is it with Nige and Manu? A secret love tryst gone wrong? Macron seems to live rent free in Nige’s head. Despite slagging him off at every opportunity, Nige is desperate to meet him. And can’t believe it when Manu says no. He doesn’t like it when Nige talks dirty … This one will run and run.
