She has gone the full Bernard Bresslaw. A horrible year in office has tarred Rachel Reeves’s voice. It is deeper, more adenoidal. In her conference speech she kept honking: ‘Don’t tell me there is no difference between a Labour government and a Conservative government.’
Spot on. Conservatives create jobs. Stand up to militant unions. Cut National Insurance rates.
She delivered this tagline in a staccato contralto accompanied by slow shaking of the head and a stare of constipated determination. Army doctors used to prescribe prune juice for that sort of thing.
The voice was squirted from the base of her sternum through various pipes and cylinders, round gunky U-bends, wet tonsils and the froggy swamp of her larynx. When it finally emerged it was as echoey and butch as a sousaphone. A phlegmy cronk. Mucus to your ears. Robot with a bunged-up nose.
‘Have faith,’ she croaked. ‘We’ve turned our backs on the path of decline.’ The economy was going gangbusters. She was ‘proud’ of how well things were going. And she was going to abolish youth unemployment. Just like that! ‘I can see the destination. I will not rest until our patriotic cause is realised. A better Britain is within reach.’
Labour activists were determined to show support. They must know she’s a disaster, just as they must, surely, comprehend the limitations of that oblong potato of a PM who was clapping on the stage. But for the moment they’re sticking with them.
Palestine protesters kicked off after ten minutes. Delegates jeered and applauded, making more noise than the hecklers. It was rowdier than a Ryder Cup green. Ms Reeves kept bellowing, shouting into the tornado, biting the air like a mad terrier chasing the postman’s van. None of us could hear what she was saying.
A bank of MPs obediently led the standing volleys of applause. Ms Reeves attacked ‘dangerously wrong’ critics who thought the money pit was bottomless.
Rachel Reeves delivered her tagline in a staccato contralto accompanied by slow shaking of the head and a stare of constipated determination, writes Quentin Letts
This was said to be aimed at Andy Burnham, the young Pretender, who roams the conference in dark civvies, a lick of black hair askew on his fringe. He’s the new Bob Dylan. The MPs clapped the anti-Burnham line hard, not realising that their own recent rebellion against welfare cuts was just as ‘dangerously wrong’.
Amid all this Lord Liddle, the great panjandrum of Europeanism, one-time Miss Moneypenny to Peter Mandelson, somehow managed to rest his eyes.
Ms Reeves announced libraries for all. Every primary school in the kingdom was to have one. Perhaps they’ll stock my new novel. When she repeated her line about the difference between Labour and the Tories she blinked two or three times, lower lip a-quiver with defiance. Her vowels became diphthongs, almost New Zealandish. She attacked Liz Truss without irony.
There was (medical term) a premature peroration. We all thought – alleluia! – that she had finished and the BBC’s Nick Robinson dashed from his seat, quite the whippet. Then Ms Reeves blinked, turned the ignition key, and set off again with another paragraph of stuff about ‘our patriotic mission’.
It would be another ten agonising minutes before she stopped. The hall again leapt to its feet, by now in pathetic gratitude that the ordeal really was over. Wes Streeting led the ovation from the front row, holding his hands high in front of his face. Throw that lad a sprat.
In other news: the Gaza debate was efficiently muzzled; Defence Secretary John Healey spoke of ‘advanced drones in Swindon’ (how jolly rude to Wiltshire); David Lammy hammed it up, crouching and bending so much at the lectern that he could have been doing skiing exercises. Yvette Cooper blurted her way through a peevish speech.
Her replacement as Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, circa 5ft tall, disclosed that, having worked the till at her parents’ corner shop she used to ‘keep a cricket bat behind the counter, just in case’.
It might still be necessary – to whack Yvette if she comes to pinch back her old job.
