It’s this season’s fashion accessory for every politician. Outside election campaigns, press conferences usually signal major set piece events or a national emergency. Now you can’t move for them. Reform have had four inside a week with another one lined up for tomorrow. Even Kemi Badenoch has been at it with a bizarre outdoors show-and-tell last Thursday. Blink and you would have missed it.
Tuesday was Rachel Reeves’s turn. Her Lance Corporal Jones “Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic!” moment. Normally a chancellor takes a vow of silence in the weeks leading up to the budget. Locked away in the Treasury, head down over economic forecasts, anxious to give nothing away.
But not this year. Now Rachel wanted to give as many clues away as possible. Call it the budget performed in interpretative dance. Nothing actually spelled out but the message was clear. Not least in the timing. A press conference that takes place at 8.10am in Downing Street and is broadcast on nearly every terrestrial channel screams: “Help! Things have gone seriously tits up!” Anyone watching would have been well advised to run for cover. You could see the bad news coming a mile away.
This was Reeves trying to catch a break. Hoping to get in the bad headlines early so that, come 26 November, she will get an easier ride. Let people imagine the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it turns out not to be so terrible as expected. We are rapidly approaching the point where words no longer have meaning.
A speech that was delivered as code. Twenty minutes of white noise in which the thing she was trying to tell us was never actually mentioned. How to tell your audience you are going to raise income tax without actually telling them you are planning to raise income tax. Something she and Keir Starmer have been practising relentlessly for the last couple of months. There can’t be many people left who aren’t preparing to be worse off. So you could call it job done.
“I want to be honest with the country,” Reeves said. Really? It didn’t feel that way. For a start, there was the inability to say the one thing that was on her mind. Around which everything else was just padding and self-justification. Then there were the more philosophical questions. If she was being honest now, how come she hadn’t been able to be honest with us previously? Was the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, VAT and national insurance never meant to be taken seriously? Just some bullshit to win an election. And why repeat the promise to the CBI when she must have known she was unlikely to be able to keep it?
Next we were into Schrödinger’s economy. At last year’s budget, Reeves had fixed the foundations of the economy and yet somehow failed to fix the foundations of the economy. Everything was both tickety-boo – we were the fastest growing economy in the G7, borrowing costs were going down etc – and yet she somehow now had another hole in the public finances to fill that she hadn’t anticipated. Nor should we be too bothered by the forecasts of the Office for Budget Responsibility because their forecasts were not forecasts. They were forecasts that looked backwards. We’ll have to take her word for that.
Anyone would be facing these choices that could not be named, Rachel continued. And she was proud of what she had done. There would be no return to the austerity of the Tories. Reform had no solutions either. We all just had to bite the bullet and suck it up. She just hadn’t anticipated quite how much damage Brexit and the Liz Truss budget had done to the economy. Basically, she was just being courteous and doing us all a favour. We should be happy to pay a bit more to protect our public services. Look at it this way, this was far more painful for her than it was for us. We are all so broke we won’t notice becoming even more broke.
“A brighter future is within our grasp,” Reeves concluded. At which point you could feel everyone’s heart sink. Politicians have been saying that repeatedly over the past 15 years and every time things have only got worse. It’s the reverse Midas touch.
Understandably most of the questions cut straight to the chase. Why couldn’t she just admit she was planning on raising taxes and why did she find it so hard to keep her promises? Rachel stonewalled. She had said all she had come to say. Now she just wanted to get the hell out of the room. It had been an excruciating 40 minutes for her. Still, at least almost no one was talking about her embarrassing rental faux pas. Bank the small wins while you can.
Reeves wasn’t the only one having a press conference. Kemi Badenoch was also up and about in front of the cameras. Only whereas the chancellor’s had some tangental purpose, Kemi’s had none whatsoever. Though the Tory leader has clearly got the taste for them. Her very own echo chamber where she can stand up in front of a small gathering of her shadow ministers and say things that are totally irrelevant to the rest of us straight to camera. Gone and quickly forgotten.
With four union jacks behind her, Kemi proceeded to deliver the director’s cut of the speech she had given last week. No one had listened then and no one was paying much attention now. Just an exercise in existential self-indulgence. This time she droned on for twice as long. Sending twice as many people to sleep.
Her theme was the familiar one. Like Nigel Farage, she is a broken record. The country is broken and only she could save it. Primarily by cutting benefits and a return to austerity. She hasn’t yet realised that as much as people have doubts about Reeves’s ability to turn the country around, the last thing anyone wants is a lecture from the Tories. After all, it was the Conservatives who brought the country to its knees and there is no enthusiasm for their return. The kindest thing they could do is give us all a break and self-destruct in private.
