Ed Miliband was in his element, spending our money. Energy Secretary Miliband had come to the Commons to announce a £14.2billion binge on nuclear energy. How skittish and giddy he was. The Red Rum teeth were brandished. All his goofiest limb-waving gesticulations were seen.
He was full of beans, his pleasure possibly accentuated by the fact that the Cabinet minister rumoured to have come a cropper in the spending review is Yvette Cooper, wife of his former shadow chancellor Ed Balls.
Miliband and Balls once competed for Gordon Brown’s favours. Later they had a fruitless spell running the opposition. That partnership ended badly.
Now Mr Miliband is back in footlights. ‘I don’t want to steal the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s thunder,’ he insisted. Don’t believe it.
He was relishing this opportunity to announce so much spending. It is a measure of Rachel Reeves‘s decline that Mr Miliband, not she, was entrusted with this splurge.
He kept nibbling his right thumb, a gerbil with its carrot. Now he grabbed his right foot, clutched his right cheek, hugged himself, flicked through his file, shrugged, muttered to himself, stroked his eyelashes, ran a finger through his fringe, patted the back of his head, excavated wax from one ear, pulled weird faces, drilled his cross-eyed stare at the carpet, clenched one fist and said ‘incredibly’ a lot.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: Would you entrust this man with £14.2billion? Would you hire him even to drive a milk float?
Shadow minister Nick Timothy said the Conservatives had long been pro-nuclear. ‘It’s kinda hard on a day like this to be a member of the Opposition,’ laughed Mr Miliband before he asserted his core philosophy: public spending. ‘I’m the guy that identified Sizewell and I’m the guy that’s delivering Sizewell,’ he crowed. ‘They didn’t put the money up!’
In Mili-land, ‘putting the money up’ is an entirely asexual, amoebic activity. How that money is created (ie taxes or borrowing) is never mentioned, writes Quentin Letts
In Mili-land, ‘putting the money up’ is an entirely asexual, amoebic activity. How that money is created (ie taxes or borrowing) is never mentioned. The Lib Dems’ spokesman, Pippa Heylings, blew up on take-off. She tried complaining that the Tories were responsible for 14 years of ‘dither and delay’ on nuclear.
It was not lost on the House that David Cameron’s Coalition government froze nuclear projects on the insistence of… the loony Lib Dems! Newcomer Heylings was whacked by heckles and laughter. This offended her tender sensibilities. ‘Can I continue? Can I continue?’ she squawked. Speaker Hoyle told her to stop being feeble.
It was, incidentally, the Speaker’s birthday. He was wished happy returns by not just one or two MPs but by 49 of them. Repetitive sycophancy syndrome.
Mr Miliband, in response to hapless Heylings, gave us a glimpse of his boyhood. He noted that Ms Heylings had ‘slightly airbrushed out the role of the current leader of the Lib Dems’ (Sir Ed Davey was, you may recall, an energy secretary in the Coalition years). ‘We’ll sort of Trotsky that out, to use a family term,’ honked Mr Miliband. In the Miliband home of the 1970s, Trotsky’s merciless treatment of his enemies was plainly an everyday topic.
Numerous Labour MPs had fled the chamber at the start of the statement but those who stayed were enthusiastic about the spending, none more so than Derby South’s Baggy Shanker. He whooped about Rolls-Royce winning a big commission to help build the new nuclear plant.
‘Great news for the country, great news for Derby,’ cried Mr Shanker. And pretty decent news for the Shanker finances, too. His register of interests shows that Mr Baggy Trousers owns more than £70,000 worth of Rolls-Royce shares, his wife and son having more. How commendably Thatcherite.
Until recently the Left would have fretted about radioactive waste from nuclear energy. In the Blair years that was the establishment’s position. Now it was only Jeremy Corbyn (Ind, Islington N) who mentioned it. Political fashion has changed. The Left has been mugged by reality. But we are all paying the cost, in billions, for its past posturing.
