That screeching noise you can hear? It might just be the government trying to avoid making contact with reality.
You know the saying. Go to sleep on it. Things will look better in the morning. Well, that didn’t quite work out for Rachel Reeves. She went to bed on Wednesday with everyone from all sides of the political spectrum giving her a hard time for the spring statement that definitely wasn’t an emergency budget. Because an emergency budget would suggest that something had gone wrong in the last six months. And Rachel was certain that everything was tickety-boo.
If anything, the world looked even bleaker for Reeves on Thursday morning. First thing she did was check her phone. She quickly wished she hadn’t. If anything, the newspaper headlines were even more brutal than the day before. Rachel closed her eyes. Wishing she could melt away. Wishing she could restart the day in an alternative reality.
This wasn’t how she had ever imagined herself as chancellor. She had wanted to be the woman who grew the economy. Who saved the nation’s finances. Instead, all she got was a kicking. She wasn’t used to failure. And this was before she had made the entirely pointless journey to a Cardiff building site for a series of hostile interviews with the media. She didn’t know if she was feeling ready for yet another punishment beating.
The BBC’s Nick Robinson was in no mood for taking prisoners on the Today programme. What had gone so wrong that she had been forced into making benefit cuts? You could hear the defensiveness in Reeves’s voice as she cut into auto-pilot. Trying to stick to the set script her advisers had prepared for any hostile questions. Everything was more or less normal, she said. Just tinkering round the edges. Global headwinds. Sticking to the fiscal rules. Look on the bright side. There was no longer a £22bn black hole and the changes to the welfare system were long overdue. Would that do?
It wouldn’t. Robinson chose to remind her of her changes to national insurance at the previous budget. That had definitely been a budget. What had that done to business confidence? Had that contributed to the growth forecasts being downgraded by 50%? Rachel decided to answer a different question. NHS waiting lists were down. Why did everyone ignore all the wonderful things she had achieved?
We then got down to the specifics of the benefit cuts. Nick played a tape of a man with brain injuries who was having his allowance cut by £900 a month and would soon be homeless. Was this what a Labour government was elected to do? Reeves sounded desperate. As if she realised she was cornered. Just in front of her she could see one of her team gesturing to slit his throat.
“I want to make everyone richer,” Rachel said. The denial was cutting in big time. “Everyone is going to be £500 richer.” The disabled people didn’t know how lucky they were to be made to work even if they couldn’t. Robinson suddenly realised the chancellor might he having a major meltdown. She didn’t seem to understand that the whole point of making benefits cuts was to save money. Just saying that everyone would suddenly have jobs that would make them richer was a fantasy. In any case, the Resolution Foundation had calculated that those on the lowest incomes would be £500 worse off.
Moving on. What about Donald Trump and the overnight car tariffs? Now the desperation turned to something close to panic. Nick had dared to mention He Who Cannot Be Named. She crossed herself as a precaution. No one in government was allowed to say anything that might offend the Sun-Bed God. Trump was to be praised for his great wisdom at all times. He could do no wrong. Even when he moved in mysterious ways.
“Um,” said Reeves. “We don’t have a trade surplus with the US.” Fingers crossed that everything will be OK. Intense negotiations with the greatest president who had ever lived. Nick’s mouth open and closed. It was dawning on him that the UK had a chancellor who wasn’t aware there was an Orange Lunatic in the White House. Someone who really didn’t give a shit about the UK. Who only might take notice if American cars were threatened with the same tariff. The UK is now officially a supplicant at the court of King Donald.
Time to bring the interview to a close. Robinson suggested that we could all be back in the same place in six months’ time. The fiscal headroom again vanishing beneath the combined effects of Trump, Putin and the government’s own policies. This was too much for Reeves. Doing all this all over again? No. It was going to be fine. Something good would happen. The Office for Budget Responsibility had forecast nearly 2% growth in five years’ time. Nick didn’t have the heart to tell her the OBR was often wrong and that 2% was nothing to get excited about.
It was much the same on LBC, where Nick Ferrari seemed so concerned for the chancellor’s wellbeing that he went relatively easy on her. Up to a point. He didn’t avoid the tough questions but he allowed her non-answers to hang. The listeners could draw their own conclusions. It was the most polite of roughing ups. He started with her own words. Last June she had promised to be the most pro-growth chancellor ever. Now look at us. What had gone wrong?
Ferrari covered much the same ground on cuts and tax as Robinson. The best that Reeves could manage was that she wasn’t Kwasi Kwarteng. Or Jeremy Hunt for that matter. Be thankful for small mercies. He ended by asking about the free tickets to the theatre and Sabrina Carpenter concert. Rachel was caught in the headlights. Unable to explain why she hadn’t offered to pay the going rate for top-price tickets. These things aren’t hard. Especially when you were caught up in a freebie scandal only a few months earlier. No one had ever said she shouldn’t receive preferential treatment. Just pay for it.
The media ordeal ended with Rachel appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Even here, she didn’t come away unscathed as Kate Garraway and Richard Madeley, not usually the fiercest of interviewers, piled in. How did she feel about making disabled people’s lives so much worse? Reeves didn’t feel very much. That was her defence mechanism. Her means of survival. Battered. Bruised. Looking no further than to get out of the morning still in one piece. One day at a time. Just for today.
