For much of the last week of the election campaign, Rishi Sunak chose to portray Keir Starmer as something of a slacker. A man who would allow a country to invade the UK if it interrupted his Friday night TV schedule. As for weekends, you could forget it. A write-off. Keir needed his lie-ins and his phone would be switched off. Call back on Monday after 9.30am.
On the basis of the last 72 hours, the Tories should have taken a leaf out of the new prime minister’s book. Because it turns out that Keir can get a lot done while he’s in bed. Or when he’s sleepwalking. The somnambulist’s somnambulist. Some might even argue he’s achieved more in three days than the Tories managed in the last 18 months.
There’s been an energy to Starmer’s slumber from which we could all learn. The dialectics of slackerdom. The more effort you put into appearing to do nothing, the more effective you become. Less is clearly more.
Forget Rish!’s tight-suited 1980s yuppy vibes. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. During the hours normally dedicated to his sleep, Keir has made some inspired appointments – viz James Timpson – visited all corners of the UK and made it clear to the country that he is happy to be judged on his actions rather than his promises. Unusually, we have a prime minister with a sense of personal responsibility. Maybe we can all now get on with our lives rather than waiting for the next clusterfuck from central government. That would make a change.
Nor is Starmer alone in his anti-work ethic that could so easily be confused as a work ethic. Most of his cabinet seem to have spent their entire weekend inside their new departments. Getting to know the layout and finding out what horrors lie in wait in their in-trays.
None more so than Rachel Reeves. She has been personally going through every drawer of every desk, searching for a stray £10 note. Anything that might help balance the books and go towards 6,500 more teachers. But after an exhaustive search, she had come up with nothing. Just one IOU from one staffer to another for the Friday night booze run to the Co-op dating back to the Boris Johnson years and three maxed-out credit cards. Not even a note saying there was no money left. At least Liam Byrne had had some manners back in 2010. The Tories were just rude.
Monday morning found Reeves back in the Treasury delivering her first speech as chancellor. In the front row were half the cabinet. All for one and one for all. It will take time for civil servants to get used to the idea of collective responsibility in government again. It might even catch on.
It must also be especially unusual for Treasury staff to now have a boss who sounds as if she knows what she’s doing. For the last couple of years they have had to put up with Jeremy Hunt, a man chosen for his affability rather than plausibility. A chancellor who seemingly understood less about economics than most of the rest of the country. There were moments during his budget statements when he seemed so out of his depth he was on the verge of tears. At least he had the integrity to have impostor syndrome. We take our comforts where we find them.
Reeves is never going to be an inspirational speaker. But so long as you’ve had three double espressos – Michael Gove can make his own pre-loading arrangements – it’s usually worth listening to what she says. In fact, being a bit soporific provides its own reassurance. I long for the economy to become a somewhat dull, niche pursuit again. For too long, all any chancellor had told us was how we were lucky not to be even more broke than we already were. That it was a race to the bottom to see if we could die before our mortgages were paid off. Assuming we were fortunate enough to own our own homes. Beneath Reeves’ surface dullness there lies real hope.
We began with the government’s own health warning. She had been through the books – something Jezza had never dared to do – and everything was just as bad as she had feared. The economy was in its worst shape since the second world war. She would explain more when she gave a statement to the Commons later in the month. It will be interesting to see what whoever happens to be shadow chancellor at the time has to say in reply. “We’re proud of our record” probably isn’t going to cut it.
Reeves praised the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility for their work – a reminder that her pre-election fiscal rules still applied – and said she would be giving her first budget in the autumn. Then to the nitty gritty. To stimulate economic growth, she was changing the planning regulations to get more houses built. One and a half million over the course of the parliament. Something that even Tory thinktanks and housebuilders had been crying out for. There would be more onshore windfarms too. Green energy a go-go.
You couldn’t help thinking Reeves had achieved more in one speech than Jezza had ever managed. The one drawback could be that the housebuilders may not have the skilled workers to actually do any building on this scale. It takes about six months to find someone to fix your roof these days. Still, I suppose there are a lot of unemployed ex-Tory MPs, so maybe they might like to retrain for the construction industry. I can just see Liz Truss as a plasterer. Jacob Rees-Mogg as a chippy.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light in Labour land, though. Emily Thornberry isn’t taking being overlooked for the attorney general job lying down. She hasn’t even yet been made a minister of state in another department. Her statement was a model of passive aggressions. She was “sad and sorry” not to have got the call, she said. Make that totally furious. Still, with a majority of over 170, Starmer can afford to piss a few people off. Or maybe he just nodded off and forgot. It’s long past everyone’s time for a few zeds.