The timing could have been better. For much of the last few weeks the Tory party has been dancing on eggshells around Labour. As if in awe of their majority. Still suffering PTSD from 4 July. Bunkering down. Even at their only prime minister’s questions, Rishi Sunak had chosen to ask about Ukraine: a subject on which everyone agrees. It was as though everyone was just trying to somehow make it through to the summer recess vaguely intact. Then to regroup.
It had all been going so well. Then on Monday it had all kicked off, with Rachel Reeves accusing the Tories of covering up a £22bn black hole in the public finances. Jeremy Hunt had angrily denied this.
Well as angrily as a man who doesn’t really do anger can get. Jezza has never been big on feelings. Wouldn’t recognise one if it bit him. Let’s just say he was quite hurt. Disappointed even. But even this was a bit half hearted. Parliamentary procedure dictated that punches be pulled. You must never call a liar a liar in the Commons. That would never do.
But neither Reeves nor Hunt could quite let it go. They were both up for some afters. Somewhere they could make their real feelings known. So on the last day before recess, both were on the morning media rounds kicking the shit out of each another.
On balance, you would have to say the chancellor won on points. But only because everyone beats Jezza on points. He’s the ultimate posh boy beta male. Whose career-defining moment was to be the head boy of a minor public school. Nothing has ever been so good since. Nor ever will be.
Reeves wasted no time in going for the jugular. Hunt and Sunak had deliberately misled the country. Had been handing out unfunded tax cuts that the UK couldn’t afford. Had already spent the year’s emergency reserves three times over in just three or four months. In short, they had lied.
Here it got somewhat confusing. Because it wasn’t immediately clear if this was the £22bn black hole that we had all expected. The one for which the Institute for Fiscal Studies had prepared the way. Or whether that black hole was now mysteriously accounted for and Rachel had discovered an entirely new one.
Not even the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) or the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) have been able to solve that one. Both have issued statements saying there were all sorts of things in the books that they hadn’t anticipated. Though, confusingly, not the full £22bn. This one will run and run.
It fell to Mishal Husain to pick the bones out of this on the Today programme. So, she began, at least some of the £22bn can be accounted for by Labour’s public sector pay awards. Now it was Reeves turn to get narked. All she had done was accept the recommendations of the pay review board. It wasn’t her fault that the previous Tory government had set the parameters so high.
OK, said Husain. So if it had been down to you, the government would not have settled the junior doctors at a 20% rise? Er… Yes, no, yes, no. We where were we were and she was sure the doctors were worth it. Possibly.
So would the nurses and other public sector workers be getting a 20% rise? That was a category error, Reeves snapped. Not keen on this particular line of logic. She changed the subject. What Mishal and Radio 4 listeners had to accept was that the Tories were very, very bad people. It wasn’t Rachel’s choice to be the Ministering Angel of Death but it wouldn’t be fair to the country were she to pretend everything was OK.
She wasn’t sorry that she had had had to cancel the 40 new hospitals. Then neither was anyone as they had never existed in the first place. Only in government do you get rewarded for creative accounting by cancelling something that was never going to happen. Nor was she sorry she was introducing means testing for the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. It would do some of the old people good to go a bit cold.
Same with social care costs. People with dementia couldn’t expect any favours from a Labour government. There were fiscal rules for a reason and she was going to stick to them. Unlike the Tories. If people started dying, it was on the Tories. Not her. She wasn’t going to do a Liz Truss and start making unfunded spending commitments. Her job was to keep saying no to everything. The IFS and the OBR seemed to broadly agree.
That just left Jezza in the more than capable hands of Justin Webb. Though even he seemed to take pity on the shadow chancellor. Rather too late in the day, some people have only just realised what most of us already knew. That Jeremy simply isn’t that bright.
So when he claimed that he hadn’t deliberately lied about the state of the economy, I was inclined to believe him. Because to have done so would have been to assume that Jezza knew what he was doing. Which he didn’t. The only reason he was put in charge of the Treasury was because he was the last person standing in the Tory party who looked like a chancellor.
Justin didn’t bother to interrupt. Or even to ask too many questions. Far easier to let Hunt implicate himself. There’s so little that he does seem to understand, it’s hard to know where to start. Jezza didn’t seem to grasp that the reason the original estimates were different from the revised estimates was because the revised estimates had been… well, there’s no easy way of saying this… revised. That’s rather the point of revision. You get a second go to have another look.
We moved on to the unbudgeted £6.4bn of costs for housing refugees. That wasn’t fair, said Jezza. Because the government had literally been on the verge of sending 60,000 refugees to Rwanda. So, put like that, the real costs were zero. It was quite sweet really. The bear with little brain. “I’m not profligate,” he concluded. He seemed to have forgotten the 4% cut in national insurance. A cut that, curiously, was worth £22bn. Just saying.
More normal service was resumed in the Commons, where we had been expecting some fireworks between Angela Rayner and Kemi Badenoch during the housing statement. All we got was damp squibs.
Angie made a few jibes about the Tories losing the election but Kemi could hardly be bothered to respond. Most unlike her. Normally she is up for any fight. Even with herself, if necessary. Now she just seemed subdued. Maybe she is trying to present a new softer side of herself to Tory MPs during the leadership election. Maybe she’s overdosed on joyless decadence. Too much time hanging out with Michael Gove.