Wait For It …

(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/RURWz05W3kM )

After what’s felt like the longest orgy in history of will-she won’t-she speculation about the 2025 budget, we’re finally going to know for ourselves this week. But it’ll take a bit longer than that to find out which bits will actually stick, and which will fall by the wayside. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, Downing Street’s grip on events is looking increasingly fragile.

Goes without saying that right-leaning commentators will tear to shreds every syllable of the speech that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver on Wednesday.

Look no further than their characterising of every tax increase as a ‘grab’. As though she’s on a moped snatching people’s mobile phones out of their hands.

But what’s likely to matter far more is what MPs on her own side make of it all. With Labour’s huge majority in parliament making this sort of stuff happen ought to be a given.

Except that dire poll ratings have given the government side collective collywobbles. In fact, in the absence of a mission clearly articulated from the top it’s looking less like a party than a loose confederation of warring tribes.

Try as he might, Keir Starmer never seems to manage to sound like he’s convinced himself, never mind anyone else.

And, cruel though this might sound, Reeves too tends to give the impression she’s after an award for the most boring speaker ever.

Not like she doesn’t have a plan. Or, rather, didn’t.

Take her bold, and highly unusual, strategy of laying the groundwork for sorting her empty purse problem at a stroke. By raising income tax.

Oops. The warring tribes wouldn’t have it, so it’s not going to happen. Simple as that.

It comes back to the elephant trap that she and Starmer set themselves before they even got elected. The promise not to go for any of the obvious ways of bringing in the boodle. Such as income tax.

Instead we can look forward to a potpourri of problematic proposals that are bound to create clearly identifiable totems. That enemies will cheerfully chop down.

Echoes in the making, therefore, of the winter fuel allowance for oldies, or benefit cuts for disabled people.

The what-if of history that comes into play here is a frank admission in the weeks after the election that the nation’s purse is much emptier than the Tories ever let on. So something really was going to have to give.

Which is all too obviously is. Leaving the field wide open for the likes of the Telegraph, Mail and Express to have it both ways. Simultaneously fuming at unforgiveable tax rises and disgraceful public services.

In the real world new prisons, hospitals and schools don’t grow on trees. Only they don’t count that bit.

Nor another historic shortfall. Our hollowed-out armed forces. A topic that came under a glaring spotlight last week.

On the very day that a high-powered commons committee lamented our inability these days to resist invasion, a Russian spy ship just outside British waters flexed its muscles at the RAF plane trying to keep an eye on it.

Try as he might to talk tough about squaring up to potential foes, the Defence Secretary’s response did rather come across as all mouth and trousers. More military means more spending. Lots of it. End of.

Another minister, meanwhile, who’s been talking tough in the last few days is the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. And, given that her ideas won’t cost shedloads of money, she might yet get her way.

It’ll mean much of the Labour party holding its nose, mind, as her upending of the existing arrangements concerning both asylum seekers and legal migrants would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

In brief, she’s proposing to make it ever so much harder for people crossing the Channel in small boats to get permission to stay in this country. And to make the future for those legally here ever so much more uncertain.

To many in Labour this feels not so much a drift to the right as swerving the car right off the road. And the howls of outrage greeting the package have been widespread and heartfelt.

But there’s also an element of realpolitik gnawing away at the party’s conscience.

A brutal awareness that the punters don’t exactly share their repulsion at the plans. And that this sort of thing might be their best if only hope of seeing off Nigel Farage at the next election.

Worth noting in this context a couple of things.

One, Farage has pretty much single-handedly blurred the distinction in the public’s mind between incomers who’ve every right to be here and those who might not. And stirred up hatred of the whole lot of them,

And two, accusations levelled at him of racism have resurfaced with a vengeance.

It’s not just that he’s allowed members of his Reform party, including an MP, to get away with saying snarky things about people of colour. It’s also that during his school days contemporaries claim he was rather fond of Adolf Hitler.

Though he denies it all, surprise surprise, these same people maintain he regularly used offensive terms about foreigners that you’d only associate with extremists and football hooligans.

Whatever the truth or otherwise, he was clearly a gobby little fellow. And on that front nothing much has changed. Which may be how come he’s so good at politics.

Not so much what you say, more a matter of how you say it. Something perhaps counterintuitively that he has in common with the Home Secretary.

Notable how Ms Mahmood uttered, in the commons chamber, the same offensive terms that Farage is accused of using.

In her case it was to make the opposite point. But, same as he does day in and day out, she was weaponizing language. Highly effectively.

Which suggests that if the Labour party does decide to ditch stammering Starmer she just could be the one to take his place. Highly speculative of course, but a space to watch.

But just for the moment, the finger of accusation’s pointed away from this government. At least partially.

Last week’s top-level and highly expensive report, years in the making, beat seven bells out of Boris Johnson and his not so merry men. And men, incidentally, they nearly all were.

To say they floundered around in the face of the Covid crisis is to put it mildly. Given the central charge that their spectacular cockup over if or when to impose a lockdown cost twenty-three thousand lives.

But it’s not just politicos in the dock. It’s also the civil servants who were supposed to be guiding them. People we wouldn’t even recognise in the street, like the then top mandarin in the health department, Sir Chris Wormald.

The report claims that he misled Downing Street about how well his team could handle the crisis. By not dampening down the Health Secretary’s overenthusiastic faith in how under control everything was.

Readers may recall the at the time married Matt Hancock’s every bit as enthusiastic snogging sesh with an aide in his office. Captured on camera for all to see. But he’s out of the picture now.

Same can’t, however, be said of Wormald. As, far from being eased off the set, he’s now Sir Humphrey to, yes, the Prime Minister.

As Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service he really is a top bod in the current government. And with friends like that, Keir Starmer might be wondering, who needs enemies?