It’s the same story at home and abroad – all about how you tell ’em. As the crisis in the Middle East ratchets maybe up or maybe down with the killing of the Hamas leader, the Prime Minister’s grappling with competing narratives over the budget in a week or so’s time. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, everything hinges on getting the story straight.
It’s a mark of how significant the Israelis’ taking out of the man behind the October atrocity a year ago that Sir Kier Starmer joined the US President and European leaders to discuss what happens next.
But while a wider conflict in the region could have repercussions for all, only the governments and warlords directly involved have any real say in what happens next.
To borrow from Winston Churchill, this could be the beginning of the end – or the end of the beginning.
Not like Starmer doesn’t have non-violent but nonetheless pivotal squares to circle on the domestic front, with the most contentious of budgets coming up in a week or so.
The build-up is always a bunfight, as ministers try to protect their own departments from getting knocked around by the Treasury.
This time, with potentially swingeing cuts in the offing, the process has ratcheted up a gear, with senior cabinet folk going over Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s head and writing begging letters to the boss.
Right wing news outlets are inevitably presenting this as proof that the government’s in disarray. Others suggest it’s evidence of inexperienced ministers not quite getting how these things are done.
It’s kind of psychological warfare, as officials at Number Eleven threaten all sorts of scary things, to soften them up and get them to accept lesser evils.
All too many of these seem inevitable, as the Tories stand accused of working up spending plans that they hadn’t fully costed, on the grounds that it’d be down to Labour to pick up the tab.
Reeves has now gone further, suggesting that even if she does balance the books all that’d do is leave departmental spending flatlining for years.
Which is why, to really get things going she’ll need to double the extra money that she originally thought she’d be needing. Up from around to twenty billion to forty.
The question then is will she try to plug the gap by cutting spending or hiking taxes? A combination of both, obviously, but logically, as a Labour government, the emphasis more likely on the latter.
But during the campaign Starmer promised faithfully not to bash working people with rises to VAT, income tax or national insurance.
Because those three add up to three quarters of the money the government Reeves is left fighting with one hand tied behind her back.
She also runs the risk that alternative schemes she comes up with could end up costing rather than enriching the Treasury.
There’s also the problem of whether ‘working people’ includes their employers. A valid question as it looks like she will up their contribution to national insurance. A cost that they could well pass on.
A tricky sell then, however it’s framed. Reeves is braced for brickbats from all sides, and she’ll be hard put to state the obvious – that we can’t afford European-level services on American-level taxes.
But what she can do is big up the way she’s rejigging the way the Treasury does its sums to free some fifty billion extra for major projects like roads and hospitals, green energy and housing infrastructure.
And now that Starmer’s got a new head honcho who’s a messaging maestro there’s every likelihood there’ll be less of the Eeyore and more of the sunny uplands on offer.
All this will dovetail with the very big deal of an investment summit early last week. As is the way of things, that’s vanished from the headlines. But never to be seen again? Not a bit of it.
Top bosses and bankers, UK and overseas-based, gave a comprehensive thumbs up to Starmer’s pro-business approach and got their chequebooks out.
Of course many, perhaps most, of the new projects have been in the pipeline for longer than the life of this government.
But the fact that the July election didn’t put them off is a feather in the Prime Minister’s hat. And the extra sixty-three billion pounds they’re now going to shell out will do the nation plenty of favours.
The only downside was how much higher that total might have been but for Brexit. The Bank of England reckons it’s lopped about a quarter off the investment we might otherwise have expected.
This government’s steps in the direction of rapprochement were welcomed at the summit, though more tangible moves would have been appreciated.
Which brings us on nicely to internal Tory tussle for Rishi Sunak’s job, which will be resolved early next month after the party membership has made its choice.
In a televised debate last week Robert Jenrick made his clearest and most hardline pitch yet to the four million folk who flipped over to Nigel Farage’s anti European Reform Party.
His rival, Kemi Badenoch, countered with the contention that: ‘We are a broad church, but if somebody says they want to burn your church down, you don’t let them in.’
She laughed off a jibe that she was so combative that she could pick a fight with her own reflexion, and ended up with the live audience clearly on her side.
The result, however, will come just as the world’s attention’s bound to be fixated on who’s going to be the next President of the United States.
It’s still too close to call, with the American system tilted in such a way that the outcome could be decided by a few thousand votes.
Makes our crude first past the post method seem quite sensible, seeing as the electorate there numbers more than a hundred and sixty million people.
But the stakes could hardly be higher, given the very real fears that a Trump victory could also spell victory for Russia in Ukraine. Not to mention the potential for violence within the USA if he loses.
Seems anything’s possible, as the most senior military adviser during his White House tenure, General Mark Milley, now sees him as ‘fascist to the core,’ and ‘the most dangerous person to this country’.
Fellow retired member of the American top brass Major-General Randy Manner, has gone further, citing parallels between Trump and Adolf Hitler.
Little wonder the pollsters stateside are nervous about saying too much. If their predictions coalesce to the point of becoming self-fulfilling prophesies they could be caught up in a frightening tangle.
Not that any of that troubles the Busken Bakery in Cincinnati.
It’s been running its own alternative surveys for the last forty years and got the result right just as often as America’s top polling guru Allan Lichtman.
The methodology is simplicity itself. It offers cookies with the candidate’s faces on them, and the one that sells the most has turned out to the winner in nine out of ten elections.
With all the expertise and money that goes into trying to get this stuff right, the Busken busking-it technique surely does take the biscuit.
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