(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/024snA8lEXM)
Party conferences come and go, the pound in your pocket lingers. Or doesn’t. While leaders, would-be leaders and their groupies talk among themselves, the nation has good reason to be far more interested in next month’s budget. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, the Chancellor’s choices are wide open.
Annoyingly, only the infinitesimal minority of the population that fully understands the niceties of macroeconomics can be expected to follow what’s going on in the Treasury.
But what the clever clogs with their calculators and spreadsheets are up to could pass our way something that we can, vaguely, get our heads round. Fifty billion pounds.
Word is the they’re working out ways to change which bits of government borrowing to count and which bits to leave out.
And if their revamp comes right then there’ll be shedloads more to splash out on things that we’ll all notice, like roads, housing, green energy and other large-scale projects.
Again thanks to the mysterious magic of mathematics, however, that doesn’t mean the tax hikes and spending cuts we’ve been hearing so much about lately are headed for the bin.
That’s because day-to-day departmental spending comes out of a different piggy bank. And Chancellor Rachel Reeves won’t even think about giving herself extra wiggle room on that front.
If for no other reason she simply can’t, after she’s spent so much time and energy accusing the Tories of being slapdash about this sort of thing.
Look no further than Liz Truss’s brief bash at being Prime Minister. No one can dispute that her whacko wheezes nearly blew up the British economy.
So what we were left with at the Labour conference last week was Keir Starmer trying to refine his message that today’s gloomy small beer will take time to turn into daylight and champagne.
Which made it all the more unfortunate that what his critics see as his own taste for the high life kept coming back to haunt him.
He’s declared everything, it’s all within the rules and a lot of it makes perfect sense. Notably his staying away from home so his son could do his GCSEs without media intrusion.
But he has accepted more freebies than any other politician. And he hasn’t handled the controversies particularly adroitly.
Not so much a question of what he’s done as how it looks. Some bits, even some of his top team privately admit, should have been blindingly obvious.
Rishi Sunak was rubbish at this sort of thing, and it cost him dear. And one thing Starmer really doesn’t need is the label ‘tin-ear Keir’.
But time heals, sometimes. Witness the Foreign Secretary David Lammy sitting down to dinner last week with the man he once described as a ‘neo Nazi sympathising sociopath’.
Starmer was also there, probably trying to persuade would-be President Trump to look more kindly on Ukraine if he does make it back to the White House.
The Donald’s grasp of facts, meanwhile, is often questioned. And arguably he wasn’t quite up to speed when announced that his guest of honour was as ‘very popular’.
Sir Keir can but hope his efforts in government will earn him that description in time. But for the moment, polls suggest, he’s anything but.
Not only did YouGov find that three out of four people disapprove of politicians accepting gifts, Opinium suggested Starmer’s personal rating has dropped forty-five points since he became PM.
That actually puts him behind, er, Rishi Sunak. Oops.
Strange business, politics. What should have been a celebratory conference after Labour’s historic win turned out to be a slightly anxious affair.
But at least the Tory conference is set to live up to – or, rather, down to – expectations.
It’s thinly attended, even Sunak’s only showing his face for a few hours. And he’s not scheduled to make a speech.
Instead, the highest point, such as it is, will be the four wannabe replacement leaders making their pitch for the job.
And even that’s beset with grumbles, as there’s a widespread sense that the ponderous nature of the contest is leaving the goal wide open for the new Labour government for far too long.
As one top Tory put it privately: ‘It feels like four people are competing to be the head of deckchairs on the Titanic.’
Still, those of the party grassroots who are actually there will be taking due note of the appeals being made to them.
That’s because, when the MPs have whittled down the numbers to two, they will make the final choice. Some four months after the race started and just a couple of days before the US presidential election.
Brilliant timing? Doesn’t take a lot of working out where the media focus will be that week. Spoiler alert: Not on them.
Meantime, with the race relatively wide open, and presumably for want of anything better to get their teeth into, the Spectator magazine asked the hopefuls what was the naughtiest thing they’d ever done.
Kemi Badenoch, who’s the darling of the right and clearly wants to keep it that way, refused to say.
James Cleverly, former loyal lieutenant to both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, confessed that it wasn’t so clever of him to admit publicly that he’d enjoyed the odd spliff at uni.
Former soldier Tom Tugendhat pleaded guilty to invading Iraq. Not, as it turned out, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s finest hour either.
But the prize for originality and sheer silliness surely goes to former senior minister Robert Jenrick.
To quote him in full: ‘After a few too many drinks, as a teenager, I did accept a bet to climb the Christmas tree in Wolverhampton’s city centre. That did not end well.’
You can’t say he doesn’t aim high. Whether he gets there or not is another question.
But, back to the real world and the real people in it, Bill Clinton’s line about the economy, stupid, will become ever more relevant as the October 30th budget looms closer.
And Rachel Reeves’ talk of tough choices will sound ever more euphemistic to those for whom the cost of living actually is a crisis.
This is not just the oldies who were championed at the Labour conference because some really will feel the pinch when they don’t get their winter fuel allowance.
There’s also struggling mums wondering how they’ll make ends meet when they’re having to shell out so much for so many things for their newborn tinies.
But there’s some help at hand from an unexpected source.
It started with an online trend in America, under the TikTok tag ‘she deserved the purse’. A little video of someone’s kindness garnered millions of likes and got folk thinking everywhere.
UK social media influencer Liana Jade filmed herself popping fivers and tenners into items for babies in Sainsbury’s, along with little notes saying ‘you are so loved’.
She says it’s: ‘The sweetest trend to ever circulate.’ And you can’t argue with that.
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