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The worst-timed foreign visit by a politician this week was LA mayor Karen Bass deciding to attend the inauguration of the president of Ghana. The second worst might be Rachel Reeves’s decision to push ahead with her China bridge-building trip against a backdrop of market turmoil, soaring UK borrowing costs and the inevitability of rising food prices. But look, maybe have no fear. The chancellor has apparently told all her cabinet colleagues to “cease anti-growth measures” – amazing – and also to come up with specific plans to boost economic activity. I am already picturing her opening the bits of paper from the hat. “Right, I’ve got 20 for ‘build an effing time machine’ and one that just says ‘Pass’. Sorry, Lammy – this isn’t Celebrity Mastermind.”
As for auto-satirical lowlights further down the ministerial ladder, do keep your eye on anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq. The very regrettable lesson of the past few years in UK politics is that no matter how bad things seem, they can always take on a rosy glow in light of what comes after. The premiership of David Cameron seemed less foolhardy once we were living through the premiership of Theresa May. The premiership of Theresa May seemed less chaotic once we were living through the premiership of Boris Johnson. The premiership of Boris Johnson – well, lettuce not be too hasty. But contemplating the Siddiq situation, was it really so bad that Chris Grayling once gave a ferry contract to a firm with no ferries, considering that these days the anti-corruption minister could have three London properties she’s tied to investigated by the National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit? Siddiq has distanced herself from her deposed aunt’s authoritarian regime in Bangladesh – but not, it seems, from the properties given or made available to her by people with close links to that regime. Either way, we are asked to have full confidence in Keir Starmer’s assertion that he has full confidence in her.
For at least the last two years of the previous Conservative government, whenever I did public events with a Q&A, people would always ask: what on earth will you write about when Labour comes to power? You can’t give specific spoilers, of course. But given the political inheritance and perhaps more ominously the political calibre of the prospective personnel, my answer was always a version of: this. This thing you are watching now and by which you are, to echo big Rusty Crowe’s rhetorical inquiry in Gladiator, not entertained. If you ever wholly believed in “the grownups”, I’ve got a bridge – and indeed a bridge-building trip – to sell you now.
After all, it was barely two months ago that Reeves was defending her budget to the CBI. As she explained to business people who had declined to see its charms. “We did wipe the slate clean, put public finance and public services on a firm footing, and as a result we won’t have to do a budget like this ever again. And unlike the last government I will only be doing one budget a year.” Alrighty – see you in March! What can you call a spring budget that isn’t a budget? How about Fyre budget? I feel like “mini-budget” is already taken.
Speaking of which, you’ll have noted that Liz Truss is threatening to sue Starmer for saying she “crashed the economy”. Yup, if you’d like a free speech nut with your salad, Liz has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the prime minister saying this repeated assertion could cause serious harm to her reputation. The economy didn’t crash because there was no rise in unemployment and economic output did not fall, Liz informs mortgage holders and other sufferers of imaginary financial illness. What can you say, other than: please let this courtroom drama get greenlit. Behold, the fully oxidised last-prime-minister-but-one taking the rapidly oxidising current prime minister on a trip to the high court to argue about the meaning of the word “crash”.
The spectacle would be of a piece with the past couple of weeks, which have felt like watching the self-destruction of politics as we know it on triple speed. We have the world’s richest man making spectacularly uninformed yet politically market-moving interventions every 10 minutes. Chasing those, we have Kemi Badenoch, who was supposed to be smart but comes across as a lightweight and permabungling agent of chaos. This week found the Tory leader playing stupid procedural games by trying to kill a major bill aimed at protecting children, supposedly to protect children – and not realising that she was simply bolstering the notion of that word you hear more and more about the mainstream political spectrum: the uniparty.
As for the chief beneficiary of the mainstream blowing itself up, one poll this week put Reform level with Labour at the top of the polls at 25% each, while another had them at 22% – just 4 percentage points behind the Tories and Labour (tied at 26%).
Indeed, many of you might be starting to feel like there’s a mysterious physics to it all. Elon Musk toys with giving Nigel Farage a $100m donation? Plays well with many disaffected younger voters he needs to draw into his coalition. Musk bins him off, saying he hasn’t got what it takes? Plays well with the disaffected Tories he needs who are always going to think Tommy Robinson’s a violent criminal. Like it or not, Farage is starting to develop that Trumpian thing of having his own gravity system, where everything that happens – even if it theoretically seems bad in the moment – ends up playing well for him. And the government? Well, quite the opposite.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
