Andrew Gimson’s Spending Review sketch: Reeves dismays even her own colleagues

What a picture of gloom the Labour front bench presented as Rachel Reeves declaimed her Spending Review. The picture accompanying this article shows several of them, forced to sit and listen as the Chancellor tried to bludgeon the House into submission.

Reeves made no attempt to take the nation into her confidence, and her colleagues looked as excluded as the rest of us.

We were offered no argument about what she is doing and why she believes it will come right. She instead made a series of assertions which managed to be simultaneously dull and implausible.

This is government by aspiration: “We will make Britain a defence industrial superpower,” Everything she touched on is going to be wonderful, and will have more money spent on it, except hotels for asylum seekers.

But if more money is going to be spent on everything, except hotels, where will it come from? Will there be countervailing cuts about which, except for the hotels, we have not been told?

Or will taxes go up in the autumn? It was perhaps too much to expect her to tell us that, but by not telling us anything, she created a sense of foreboding.

At one point she proclaimed the merits of “Securonomics”, which sounds like one of those dodgy sects one used to see advertised on the London Underground.

A few moments later she promised that “to unlock the potential of all parts of Britain we are going farther.”

Reeves cannot see potential without unlocking it, renewal without delivering it, ambition without taking it forward, foundations without fixing them. Her use of language is deliberately brutal. This was boredom turned into a weapon of war.

How sleep-deprived the Cabinet ministers looked, and hungry too, for to show their support for Reeves, they were missing their lunch.

Lean, hungry and confident they could do a better job than Reeves: let us not make trouble by identifying those who looked especially keen to take over at the Treasury, but none of them looked convinced by her.

Diane Abbott, gazing fixedly at Reeves from the corner seat below the gangway where Edward Heath used to sit, looked even less impressed by the Chancellor than her Cabinet colleagues were.

Mel Stride, for the Conservatives, was rather good. He denounced “the spend now tax later review”, and warned that “our country is now vulnerable” to any external shock, for Reeves has left no contingency fund to meet it.

Stride was so rude about her that he roused the workers and peasants on the Labour backbenches to protest. They know their fate is in her hands, and do not like it when a Conservative points out that she is making a hash of things.

Reeves rose to reply to Stride. She insisted the Government has “spent the first year fixing the foundations of our economy”.

If the foundations prove not to be fixed, out Reeves will have to go. Sir Keir Starmer’s survival will depend on getting the timing of this right. One assumes Morgan McSweeney has pencilled in a date.

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