27-03-2025
Reeves comes off worse in encounter with reality
In retrospect, it was probably an act of cruelty to let Rachel Reeves into the TV studios on Thursday morning. For all her desperate desire to project a #GirlBoss persona, even on a good day, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives off the general sense of someone who would find herself logistically challenged by a Muller Fruit Corner.
Having been so happy in the cloud cuckoo land of her spring statement, where all was fine and dandy in the UK economy, it would have been kinder to leave her there. Instead, Labour HQ sent her out on the media round.
By the end, you almost felt sorry for her. All that hubristic crowing at the last Budget about being the first-ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer (while crippling entire industries at the flick of a pen). Now she stood in the sad reality of her position; broke, wet and disliked.
Though Reeves was late for her interview with GB News, her appearance is perhaps a sign that knickers are becoming even more twisted in No 10 about the upcoming Runcorn and Helsby by-election.
Like other government ministers, Playmobil Chancellor has sometimes dodged interviews with the channel. So for her first foray into the lions' den, Labour HQ had plonked her in front of a building site. Behind her, throughout the interview, a truck could be heard, reversing very slowly. The metaphor gods were feeling especially uncharitable today.
Downing the pound and passing the buck
'Why do you blame everyone else but refuse to take responsibility yourself?' asked one of the GB News hosts. The Chancellor ignored this question completely and instead answered the one she'd wanted to hear, which was about how awful Liz Truss was.
Her ride on Sky News proved a little easier. At one point she was allowed to launch into an extended monologue on the importance of her ever-changing rules to the nation's fiscal strength. She might as well have said that she was relying on a programme of mass leprechaun capture, torture and gold pot discovery to turbocharge economic growth.
Perhaps the most agonising of the Chancellor's televised clashes with the hard forces of reality occurred on ITV's Good Morning Britain, where Richard Madeley had to lay down the absolute basic rules not just of politics but of existence to Reeves. He explained that accepting free concert tickets worth thousands of pounds looks bad when you're cutting welfare spending at the same time.
The Chancellor blinked a lot before launching into her all too familiar brand of verbal flailing. 'I'm not able like I was in the past just to buy tickets for a concert,' she spluttered. Now on the grounds of pure competence, this felt believable enough. Some of those booking websites are very complicated. Yet as an excuse, it doesn't really wash.
Co-host Kate Garraway stuck the knife in next; of course, she said, Reeves needed security, of course she was entitled to a private life, she was even allowed to have fun. At this point, Reeves stared back blankly, not even a twitch of recognition on her face as to what that might be happening.
Surely, however, continued Garraway, this didn't mean you had to take freebies? Reeves promised not to take any free tickets again; unless, of course, it was related to her job. So, the campaign starts here, let's crowdfund a ticket for the Chancellor's travel back to the real world.
