There was a time when the morning after the Budget would see the Chancellor of the Exchequer on a victory lap of TV studios, explaining all the wonderful things they’d done before disappearing back into the Treasury as the wonks from the Institute for Fiscal Studies appeared to explain how the magic had been done. Those days are long gone. Now the experience is more of a gauntlet run between ranks of interviewers flicking wet towels.
In an effort to leave no metaphor unexplored, Rachel Reeves had been sent to Coventry. Usually for these things she wears a high-vis vest and stands in front of a building site. Unable to find one of those, the Treasury had for some reason dressed the Chancellor in a thick coat of post-apocalyptic green and secured a backdrop of empty shelves in a warehouse. At any moment, you feared she might have to fight off a roving gang of cannibal scavengers searching for precious firewood.
All the interviews followed a similar pattern, as the chancellor tried to explain why “working people pay a bit more” wasn’t the same as “taxes are going up”. Perhaps there is a way of doing that, but Reeves hadn’t found it. On Sky, she had barely got through her first sentence before host Sophy Ridge figuratively wrestled her to the ground and began beating her about the head with the Labour manifesto. This, you will recall, included the line “Labour will not increase taxes on working people”.
Reeves had an answer to that. “If you go on and read the next line,” she said, in the tone of a claims assessor explaining why your fire insurance doesn’t cover the sort of fire that has destroyed your house, “it talks about rates.” In other words, if you thought that Labour’s promise not to raise taxes on working people was a promise not to raise taxes on working people, it’s your own fault for not reading the small print.
As we’re doing close textual analysis of the Labour manifesto, Reeves was strictly correct that the next line read “which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT”. But the previous line was: “The Conservatives have raised the tax burden to a 70-year high.” Probably she would say that if you read that in a critical tone of voice, it is also your own fault. You were supposed to hear an unspoken implication that a 70-year high wasn’t high enough.
Ridge put her finger on one of the reasons for Reeves’s discomfort: “This is not the Budget you wanted to deliver.” Had she not criticised the freezing of tax thresholds and argued in favour of keeping the two-child benefit cap? “This was my Budget,” the chancellor answered, not entirely convincingly.
There was more of the same on Good Morning Britain. Reeves said she was “asking working people to contribute more.” Don’t think of it as a tax return – it’s more of a suggested contribution.
The tax promise is one Labour should never have made, and they should expect to suffer
She suggested it was unfair to go on at her about breaking the tax promise – “I’m chancellor in the world as it is, not in the world as I would like it to be”. And indeed it was a bit much to listen to her Tory shadow Sir Mel Stride, on the BBC at that moment, explaining that the Conservative government had been on the very point of painlessly reducing welfare spending, cutting everyone’s taxes and improving public services when they sadly lost power. But the tax promise is one Labour should never have made, and they should expect to suffer some tricky interviews for breaking it.
“I’m not pretending that what I did yesterday is not asking working people to pay more,” Reeves went on. Although that did sound very much like what she had been pretending.
Over on LBC, Nick Ferrari wanted to know how she’d felt about Wednesday’s Budget leak. “Where were you on the anger scale, one to ten?” asked a man who rarely goes below eleven.
Though he managed it when he moved on to Stride. He had been hurling fast bouncers at Reeves, but he switched to underarm tosses for the Conservative. “I just don’t think she’s a very good chancellor,” Ferrari mused. How would Stride cope with that one? The interview finished with the LBC man asking the Tory whether he, Ferrari, was a sexist for being dismissive of Reeves. The 64-year-old knight bachelor assured the 66-year-old radio host that he wasn’t. And I hope that settles the matter.
Over on the Today programme, Reeves could see the end in sight. Nick Robinson gave her a good going over, but the others had already left her a beaten woman. Would she rule out more tax rises next year? “I’m not going to write future budgets,” she said, ominously, but honestly, and staggered away. Will she be back for more next year? Does she even want to be?
