With the economy smoking like a wonky Moskvitch, how was Rachel Reeves faring?
Was she dented by ‘Awful April’ and its higher bills? Was she feeling under the cosh from Donald Trump’s tariffs and the pratfall of her Budget? Noooo. After lunch, the Chancellor came sauntering along the corridor in parliament’s Portcullis House, swinging her new, feather-cut hairdo.
‘Cooee!’ Greeting reporters with merriment she scoffed at Mr Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ and crowed about having just bumped into John McDonnell. He was Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor when she was a mere backbencher.
Now Mr McDonnell is down – he has been booted out of the parliamentary Labour Party for standing by his principles – and she is up, up and away, the chatelaine of both 11 Downing Street and Dorneywood (the grace-and-favour country house where John Prescott used to play croquet). Life is good. For her.
Ms Reeves had turned up for examination by the Commons’ Treasury committee. She pranced into the room in a green trouser-suit, same colour as the chairs, and was still shaking that mane, her orbit tinkling with laughter. What a skittish presence she has become. Odd to think that she was once regarded as ‘boring, snoring Reeves’. Her Treasury officials were a retinue of giggles. Oh yes, Chancellor, very good, Chancellor, you are a wag, Chancellor. You would have been forgiven for thinking they had all been at the malmsey.
The committee clerk did a countdown for the benefit of Parliament TV. It won’t be long before the clerks are issued with film-set clapperboards.
Then we were into the formal part of the meeting. The Reeves voice instantly changed. She was still beaming, eager to maintain that Fotherington-Tomas sunniness, but the noise from her throat quite altered. Beforehand it had been normal. Once the cameras were on her she started sounding like a duck. I suppose it must be a nervous contraction somewhere in the larynx.
Not that she had much reason for anxiety. This committee is feeble. Comically supine. Dame Meg Hillier (Lab, Hackney S and Shoreditch), who chairs it, has a nicely terse attitude. Beside her sat two Tory ex-Treasury ministers, Dame Harriet Baldwin and John Glen. They both had a tilt. There was one other old hand, Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Lab, Mitcham & Morden), who certainly knows how to bowl an aggressive line and length when required. But the others? Dear oh dear. All new MPs, wet as sprats. In a couple of cases they were even oilier.
Attorney General Lord Hermer took a swipe at the PM, saying this was a ‘dangerous moment’ for the rule of law
Rachel Reeves, matching the chairs with her green trouser-suit, was ‘weirdly coltish’
A Lib Dem called Bobby Dean (Carshalton & Wallingford) had all the gravitas of a Eurovision Song contestant. Jeevun Sandher (Lab, Loughborough) kept thanking Ms Reeves for her ‘very helpful’ answers to his patsy questions. Worst of the lot was Yuan Yang (Lab, Earley & Woodley), almost breathless with wonderment at Labour’s economic miracle. Do the people of Early & Woodley feel so lucky?
Or might they prefer their MP to ignore any instructions from the Whips and to reflect something of the financial difficulties they may be facing?
I fled, feasting my jellies instead on the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, who was talking to peers and MPs about the European Convention on Human Rights. Its 75th anniversary should be ‘a moment for national celebration’, averred his lordship, possibly envisaging grateful yokels dancing at maypoles, celebrating the nameless Strasbourg judges who tell us we can’t deport illegal migrants.
Where Ms Reeves was weirdly coltish, Lord Hermer was eerily precise, his high, papery voice coated by fake courtesy. Two tiny, anthracite eyes darted behind spectacle lenses and he wore a sheen of stubble. Lawyerly, cocksure sentences rolled forth. Was his first word, as a toddler, ‘heretofore’?
In a swipe at his own PM, he deplored criticism of judges. This was a ‘dangerous moment’ for the rule of law. Indeed so.
But the danger is not from parliamentary argy-bargy. It lies in the arrogance of dogmatically driven jurists who put the law’s sub-clauses over the fury of the proletariat.
