11-06-2025
QUENTIN LETTS: One Labour MP sat with pen poised to write down all the Chancellor's thrilling announcements. It was soon lowered
, sleek if subdued, intoned that she was 'allocating the envelope I set out in the spring'. Treasury ministers had been 'crunching the numbers, looking at the assets and the liabilities'.
Bob Blackman (Con, Harrow East): 'Who's the liability?'
That drew Cabinet laughter – more than was entirely healthy for Ms Reeves. She grimaced and blinked, momentarily thrown. In the middle of the crowded Commons cockpit, faces craning at her from all sides, she was not so much a figure reduced as a figure that has never exuded complete authority. The birdlet that has never fully flapped its wings.
Save perhaps in those first days after the general election, her Chancellorship has yet to have its time of pomp. Will it ever?
Behind her throughout the statement sat a ministerial aide, Becky Gittins (Lab, Clwyd East), looking exceptionally glum. When you hope to project confidence and political pzazz, you really don't want a wet dishcloth like Ms Gittins in shot behind you.
Ennui was evident elsewhere. To the back of the chamber Rachel Taylor (Lab, North Warwickshire) sat initially with pen poised over notebook, to write down all the thrilling announcements. The pen was soon lowered. 'Bozo' Bill Esterson (Lab, Sefton Central) peered into the foggy middle-distance. A woman possibly from Linlithgow chewed gum. At the far end of the House, Toby Perkins (Lab, Chesterfield) rested his Flintstones chin on one paw. He may well have been dreaming of his nosebag.
This spending review had been so heavily pre-briefed that when it came to the parliamentary delivery, dramatic jeopardy was absent. There was no tingle of the unknown, no excitement, no danger. This matters not simply because it spoils the event as performance art. It matters because it robs a chancellor of the aura of power. Everyone knew what was coming. There was little sense that these announcements were in Ms Reeves's personal gift. She was merely a reporter of outcomes.
Beside her sat Treasury Chief Secretary Darren Jones, clasping and unclasping his fingers. He had taken his place a minute before the start of PMQs, which preceded the statement, and for a few moments his cabinet colleagues did not make room for him. Perhaps they have come to dislike poor Darren in recent days. He very nearly sat on top of that human porcupine Bridget Phillipson. She glowered. But then, she always does.
Ms Reeves's 45-minute statement – pretty long for a spending review – was contained within a slender red folder. She wore a sage-green trouser suit. Gulping from a water glass, she held her scissored hair out of the way, to stop it becoming wet. In her first paragraph she deployed the old '£22billion black hole' line of blame on the Tories. It generated little reaction from the benches behind her. A blunt axe.
The only moment Labour MPs gave a spontaneous, feral roar of approval was when she mentioned, once again, the tax hit on independent schools. Class war still works for the Starmer party, even though many of its MPs, like the PM himself, attended fee-paying schools. Other passages garnered merely Opposition derision: claims such as 'we are renewing Britain' and 'we are starting to see the results'. At PMQs, a Labour doctor had rhapsodised about the therapeutic benefits of laughter. By that gauge, the endorphins should have been zooming everywhere.
Nigel Farage (Ref, Clacton) was singled out for two attacks by the Chancellor. A squad of beery-looking Labour blokes – Gateshead's Ferguson, Hartlepool's Brash, Chatham's Osborne and that fidgety Woodcock from Banbury – booed and jeered the Reform contingent. Could have been at a football match. Ellie Reeves, minister without portfolio, watched sister Rachel closely and did much twitching. Mel Stride, for the Tories, made the customary response. Tax rises were inevitable, he feared. He may also have called Ms Reeves 'a cork bobbing on the waves' but I can not swear to it, such was the wall of Labour noise. They are good at screaming, at least.
