.png)
22 hours ago
7
There will come a moment when the Labour claim that the Tories are to blame for everything will no longer stick. People will start shaking their heads and reckon that Labour have something to answer for. But we’re not quite there yet. At least not at prime minister’s questions. For half an hour in the Commons every Wednesday the Conservatives remain the villains of the piece.
Partly it’s the size of the Labour majority. The sheer volume of half-witted Labour MPs who are happy to bounce up and down to ask Keir Starmer whether he agrees with them that the Tories left the country in a shocking mess and only the prime minister can save their constituents. The Lib Dems and the SNP are only slightly fiercer critics of the present government. They too hate the Tories more than anyone else.
But maybe it’s also something to do with Kemi Badenoch. You get the feeling that even she reckons the Tories have been a waste of space for the past 10 years. She doesn’t go as far as rubbishing her predecessors in public – she is under orders from her advisers in CCHQ to make as few enemies as possible – but you can sense the contempt. Her heart simply isn’t in the job. She’s wondering why she ever bothered.
So Kemi does little more than go through the motions. A scattergun approach of “Labour’s job tax”, business confidence and low growth. To which every Starmer answer is exactly the same. You broke the economy. And KemiKaze is happy with that. Because she knows it’s true. She suspects Labour might not be that competent after all, but knows that even a Nobel prize winner would be struggling with an inheritance like that.
She looks at her prepared questions and responses and feels like giving up before she starts. Take that figure of every family being worse off by £3,500 that the economically illiterate Mel Stride was forced to come up with the day before. Kemi is bright enough to know that it’s completely bogus. There isn’t a single person in the country who thinks the figure can survive contact with reality. It hurts her to have to repeat it. And she dies a little inside when she does so.
What Kemi would much rather be doing is indulging her latest conspiracy theory, courtesy of Elon Musk, that the writers of the Netflix drama Adolescence based their screenplay on a true story but changed the race of the killer from a black boy. The writers have denied this, but Kemi is convinced she knows otherwise. She knows what they were thinking better than they do. Their minds have been captured by the Gods of Woke. So on brand for Kemi.
But her minders had made her stick to their script so another PMQs passed off in disappointment for the Tory MPs. Their leader didn’t crash and burn. She never left the starting line. They long for her to give the appearance of defiance, but neither she nor they can summon that level of caring. They are all still suffering from PTSD. So yet another week went by where Starmer came out unscathed with everyone nodding that the Tories are the source of all hopelessness.
The same orthodoxy has also crept into the Treasury select committee. Not so long ago, a chancellor would fear an appearance before it. It had a reputation for being the fiercest of the fierce, packed with some of the brightest backbenchers in the Commons. And Chris Philp. The Nose in search of a Bum. There’s always one exception. Fellow members of the committee from that time still want to curl up and die as they remember him asking George Osborne: “So Sir, would you agree with me that this is the best budget ever?”
Sadly the current iteration of the Treasury select committee is closer to the Philp mould. Either hopelessly fawning or desperate to prove that they have understood the detail of an Office for Budget Responsibility forecast. Or both. The committee’s chair, Meg Hillier, tried to resurrect the reputation for rigour and independence but she was fighting a lone, futile cause. No wonder Rachel Reeves was smiling when she went in. And was grinning by the time she left about two hours later.
In another life, Rachel might have had a tricky time explaining away her spring statement. How did she square away the benefits cuts? What was she planning to do if her fiscal headroom disappeared by the autumn? Or sooner if the tariffs proved even more damaging than expected?
But for Reeves, the afternoon was a doddle. A snooze. She could dazzle the crowd by clearly knowing far more than they did. A percentage here, a footnote there. She barely needed the Treasury’s director of strategy as her wingman. William Macfarlane is on a six-figure salary purely for his ability to never say anything that might in some way be helpful or revealing. People have had more fun watching paint dry than listening to Bill.
It wasn’t that none of the right questions were asked. It was more that it was so terribly cosy. Mainly new Labour backbenchers desperate not to cause the chancellor offence. “Er … Can I just check that you did consider the impact of cutting the welfare budget?”
after newsletter promotion
Rachel just nodded. She wanted everyone to know that no one could possibly have given more consideration to benefits than she had. Would that do? It would.
Nor were the two Tories on the committee much better. Harriett Baldwin and John Glen aren’t the dimmest minds around but they are hardly attack dogs. More friendly, cuddly cockapoos. Inclined to believe the best of people. Baldwin was immensely reassured to discover that Rachel would deal with the problem of the fiscal headroom as and when it occurred. No reason to get alarmed in the interim.
We did eventually get to tariffs with Glen. Might they just be a wee bit tricky? Rachel had come pre-programmed for this. She didn’t want to see any tariffs. They were bad for the global economy. But if He Who Cannot Be Named – everyone in the cabinet automatically throws up if they utter the words Donald and Trump – were to do so then she would consider her options carefully and pragmatically. In other words, we would roll over and suck it up.
Cue drinks all round.
