Rachel Reeves looked grey and grim. She had chosen to do her round of breakfast TV interviews from a new housing estate in Cardiff. Behind her the homes of the future were springing up. In a nod to satire, she was positioned on a slope that was going gently downhill.
Watching her ahead of her Spring Statement on Wednesday, I’d wondered if I’d misunderstood something. She was beaming away, accepting the congratulations of her colleagues. She’d looked more like a prize-winner than a Labour chancellor about to announce that 250,000 more people were becoming poorer. By Thursday morning, she had been disabused of the notion that journalists would choose to focus on forecasts of modest growth in the future, rather than the actual problems of right now. But, as she was to learn over the ensuing two hours, you can always get a little more disabused. And, indeed, abused.
“It’s gone wrong!” said the man from BBC Breakfast, discussing the government’s plans to get the economy growing by making it much more expensive to hire people. “It’s going down!”
The chancellor didn’t attempt to argue the point. “The world is changing,” she sighed. For instance, in the 18 hours since she’d set out the very narrow margin by which the economy might be OK, Donald Trump had announced vast tariffs on car imports, effectively rendering all her sums void. What must it be like, slaving away for months on your spreadsheets, only to see them swatted away by a man with a fake tan who doesn’t know the difference between a chat group and a conference call?
It was a brutal set of interviews. “Why are you hitting the poor and the disadvantaged?” asked the BBC. Why not put up taxes? It’s not so much that she doesn’t have answers to these questions – perhaps some of those losing welfare payments really will get jobs instead; perhaps the tighter assessments will push young people into training or work – but she is poor at selling her answers. She tends to sound as though she’s reading a script written by someone else who isn’t used to having their arguments challenged.
That would help to explain her baffling decision, after an autumn of hellish headlines about Labour freebies, to accept even more of them, taking a child to a concert at the O2. Did she really imagine no one would make anything out of that? Had she not heard of LBC’s Nick Ferrari, a man who bears down on interview subjects like a bin lorry doing 60 miles an hour? “I now have security that I can’t just sit with normal tickets at a pop concert,” the chancellor stammered. “I was advised that I should be in a box.” The O2 had sorted her out with one.
Ferrari was sympathetic, which made it even worse as he asked why she hadn’t simply insisted on paying the cost of her tickets. “I-I understand how this seems to people,” she went on, sounding like a chastened employee accepting a final written warning. “I will think carefully about any hospitality that I take.”
By the time she got to the Today programme, she was sounding worn down. Would the UK retaliate against Trump by, for instance, removing subsidies from Elon Musk’s Tesla? “We don’t want to get into a trade war,” she pleaded. That doesn’t look like being enough to keep us out of one.
Only when, right at the end, Nick Robinson listed all the horrible things she’d had to implement did the chancellor get into at least second gear, giving a list of some good things she hoped to achieve.
If it’s any comfort, you can’t go downhill for ever
But she was still on that downhill slope. Good Morning Britain asked her if she felt sick about cutting benefits for disabled people. Bloomberg tried to get her to comment on possible retaliatory tariffs against the US.
At the end of the line, in every sense, was GB News. Reeves looked a broken woman. Was she the weakest link in the Cabinet, they asked? “I’m tasked with growing the economy,” she replied. There were noises coming from off-screen: either the sound of a buildering hammering a joist or a Treasury press officer banging their head against a wall. If it’s any comfort, you can’t go downhill for ever. At some point you have to hit the bottom.
