Reeves flashes an awkward smile with the air of Comical Ali
Rachel had graduated from accounts to a massive warehouse full of piping on the edge of the Cotswolds. It looked like the sort of place where a particularly creative Midsomer Murder might happen. No such high campery from the Playmobil Chancellor alas.
There are whole acres of forest that remain undisturbed since the Norman Conquest which are less deserving of the epithet 'wooden' than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. One can almost imagine Sir Keir getting in touch with his oft-mentioned toolmaking ancestry and carving, like Geppetto, a little wooden apparatchik all of his own.
As such, she isn't necessarily the first person you'd put forward for a big morale-boosting speech on growth. Yet here we were, hoping that a beloved British character actor would be crushed by a wheel of cheese or bashed with a croquet mallet in the background by way of light relief.
Part of the Chancellor's problem is that she has to begin every speech by saying what an irredeemable bin fire the economy was when she first walked into Number 11. I hope someone has trademarked the use of '£22 billion black hole' and 'disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget'.
She then had to perform a rhetorical handbrake turn in order to get us to the sunlit uplands. This she tried to achieve by listing all the brilliant things she'd already done to get the economy into the wonderful state it is now. Ha ha.
'I set up new fiscal rules which are non-negotiable and will always be met,' Reeves asserted, apparently believing that her made-up rules had somehow morphed into the Mosaic Covenant without a hint of irony.
She bragged about her begging-bowl trip to China. I sometimes think about the poor CCP-bugging official who is tasked with listening in to her office. It must make the Shipping Forecast sound like 50 Shades of Grey in comparison. She delighted in the creation of a new quango called 'Skills England'.
Amid all the predictable bumph there were major policy announcements that will dominate the headlines: support for a new runway at Heathrow, billions for new reservoirs, and a plan to turn the area between Oxford and Cambridge into a new Silicon Valley.
It's a sign of the topsy-turvy world that we live in that this latter news will probably be better received by dons over their port in the SCR than it will be by the students at those universities themselves, who are probably planning to lie down in front of bulldozers as we speak.
One got the slight sense that these headline-grabbers were the Chancellor's last throw of the dice. Sir Keir hasn't exactly been supportive of his Chancellor and the stress of a job for which it has become clear she is underqualified has been visibly getting to her. Outside, farmers made noisy protests at the spite tax, which the Government is determined to foist on them.
There's the slightest air of Comical Ali about each governmental policy launch. All is very obviously not going well. Even today, as she flashed awkward smiles towards the press at the moments where she'd clearly been coached to do so, she looked a little bit like she'd been prepped by an undertaker.
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