After earlier leaks, now the whole Hoover Dam collapsed. Total Seepage Situation. Rachel Reeves was already in the Commons chamber when one of her young shavers, Torsten Bell, passed her his mobile telephone.
If Mr Bell looked queasy, it was understandable. The entire Budget had been given away online by those gumbies at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
Complete spill. Out on the news wires and City trading sites. Before she had even uttered a word.
Moments earlier the Chancellor had sashayed to the Commons frontbench behind Sir Keir Starmer. She had flicked her sleek locks, high on power as she inhaled Labour backbenchers’ ululations.
But then she glanced at little Torsten’s telephone. Her face tautened. Her eyes popped out on bedsprings and dangled like a couple of toffee apples.
She said ‘pssst!’ out of the side of her mouth at her neighbour, Treasury Chief Secretary James Murray. He’s the one who looks like a mortuary attendant. Working with Reeves, it pays to be good with stiffs.
After ingesting the news of this gaffe, the Chancellor glowered at the ceiling, yanked hold of a pen and started writing her opening remarks to admit that the whole damn thing had been pre-empted.
She stood to a tunnel of noise. The Conservatives were feral. Seldom has a Chancellor looked so rocked and lonely at the start of a Budget.
Rachel Reeves can be seen reading the news that the Budget has leaked at Prime Minister’s Questions
‘A serious error on THEIR part,’ she bellowed, referring to the Office for Budget Irresponsibility. Then she tried to get her planned speech off the ground, sliding into its opening paragraphs about how Labour was ‘rebuilding the economy’ and restoring ‘stability’.
I’m afraid she was barely audible, such was the derisive laughter.
Against this gale of ridicule her larynx convulsed. She was having to force it too hard. The result was an even more metallic honk than normal – a butch Queen Lear battling to be heard over the drenching cataracts. Behind her there shivered a miserable crew.
Her new parliamentary aide Helena Dollimore shrank back, pink-faced. Torsten twitched. Sir Keir blinked urgent Morse Code messages to the nearest alien spaceship to come and rescue him from this disaster. Ed Miliband rubbed his chin in contemplation.
‘These are my choices,’ cried the Chancellor. ‘EXACTLY!’ replied the Tories. She was barely past the second page of her hour-long speech when she paused, ill-advisedly, for breath.
A Conservative heckler jumped into the gap to shout: ‘I’d skip to the end if I were you’. More howls of derision. More glumness from the Labour side.
Inside Ms Reeves’ head, what can it have been like? A swirl of white panic? The noise you get at the top of the Matterhorn when the blizzard is accelerating and the last mountain goat has disappeared from view? Her brother-in-law, Lord Cryer, gazed from the peers’ gallery, urging her to somehow keep going. Of Ms Reeves’ husband I could see no sign.
Slowly she gained some poise. She managed to poke some fun at the Scots Nats and she made a joke about the Greens’ boob-doctor of a leader: ‘The only thing getting bigger under his approach is inflation.’
Rachel Reeves poses with the red box outside her office in Downing Street ahead of the Budget
She enjoyed spending billions more on benefits – ‘It’s for the kids’. This was cheered by her side. A trio of MPs behind her, Kirith Entwistle, Catherine Fookes and Lucy Rigby, nodded in time.
But then she reached the eye-gouging tax rises.
‘Here it comes,’ shouted another Conservative. Glumness descended on Labour’s benches.
And that is how they stayed when Kemi Badenoch made her reply. Kemi went for the jugular. Speaking ‘woman to woman’, she dismissed the Chancellor’s claims that critics were driven by sexism.
‘They’re complaining because she’s utterly incompetent.’ Reeves and Starmer were ‘Laurel and Foolhardy’. These and other Badenoch barbs stung their targets.
A blind Lib Dem MP’s guide dog rolled on the carpet, joining Tory delight. And then the mutt started begging for biscuits. As the rest of us may soon have to do once the tax hikes bite.
