Desperate Reeves resembled a Prozac salesman on the Titanic

Telegraph

26-03-2025

Rachel Reeves approached the despatch box like Anne Boleyn at the hairdressers and quickly raised the first laugh of the afternoon when she declared that Labour were strengthening the economy. Earlier that day, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had downgraded its growth forecast from 2 per cent to a paltry one.
Whether our Playmobil-headed Chancellor was born immune to reality or whether her handlers gave her a dose of the strongest inoculation against it this morning, either way, today's spring statement resembled an extended trip on LSD. The picture Reeves painted was of a country on the up, thanks to her brilliance and Sir Keir's amazing plan. There are people in Broadmoor with more realistic fantasies than this.
Reeves's Fantasia frequently caused the opposition benches to erupt into laughter. One such moment was 'at the Budget I fixed the foundations of the economy'. So too when she bragged of 'restoring stability to the public finances'. This was pure surrealist genius, Rachel Reeves's early Monty Python phase. Things occasionally veered from Lewis Carroll to Kafka: there were of course more quangos to be imagined into being. How we've lived so far without ' The Defence Growth Board ', I will never know.
On her rare trips into reality and the acknowledgement of the mess we are in, the Chancellor was at pains to blame everybody else. Vladimir Putin, Liz Truss, vague statements about 'our changing world', all were more culpable than the person actually in charge of the economy. But the most frequently blamed were 'the Party opposite'; indeed if the Exchequer had a penny for every time the Chancellor repeated this phrase, the national debt would be cleared in no time. This is a classic Starmerite gripe but today Playmobil Rach took it to the level of a verbal tic. It was as if she'd been struck with a very boring form of Tourette's.
The Chancellor did own up to some bad news, but when she did so it was with a nonchalant air, maintaining the same breezy positivity she had adopted at the start. The general impression was of a Panglossian inanity; a Prozac salesman on the Titanic. She triumphantly announced that, several emergency measures later, government spending was back within the confines of OBR forecasting. A further surreal irony here is that economic policy is nowadays entirely based on forecasts that will inevitably be miles out. Had the OBR used bird entrails rather than their familiar graphs and spreadsheets, their predictions could scarcely be less accurate.
I've rarely seen the Tories jollier. After all, there isn't a great deal to cheer them these days but Rachel's foray into fantasy had left them grinning. Shadow chancellor Mel Stride visibly relished his role in forcing Ms Reeves to confront reality – perhaps a little too much at times. Mr Stride has the general air of an over-competitive dad at a prep school sports day. He repeatedly accused the Chancellor of 'fiddling her targets', eventually prompting Headmaster Hoyle to administer a ticking off. This may have been true, but such bluntness simply isn't the done thing. In the Commons, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Parliament Square provided a much better representation of the divided, poorer and stupider country we undoubtedly are. Good and public-spirited members of the Socialist International littered the streets with Coke Zero cans while Steve Bray, the Stop Brexit Man, continued his long-running impression of a DJ at a kids' party by blasting out jaunty hits at a volume audible two boroughs away. Welcome to Rachel's stronger, richer Britain!