So who needs Armando Iannucci?
Even the grand master of political satire’s imagination would have been stretched to dream up a ‘Thick of It’ series plotline to match the extraordinary real-life saga of Budget 2025.
With a chancellor in Rachel Reeves accused of misleading (lying to?) parliament, the public, the media, the markets and apparently cabinet colleagues.
A chancellor who, back on November 4th, interrupted the breakfast TV schedules and upended millions of voters’ cereal bowls with an emergency Downing Street speech and press conference that left no doubt the economy was in such ‘Black Hole’ dire distress that she would be forced to breach Labour’s election manifesto pledge not to hike the basic income tax rate.
Only for her to drop the threat, not because of a potential revolt among left-wing Labour backbenchers, but because she was already in possession of OBR advice that the economy wasn’t in such bad shape after all. Yet It was a tax hike “charade” she’s accused of continuing for several days before coming clean when the OBR went public via the Financial Times on the forecast they’d given her as far back as mid-September.
Blowing the budget
But even Iannucci at his best wouldn’t have dared concoct the sequel scenario in which the OBR then accidentally published the highly sensitive budget details on its website around 40 minutes before the Chancellor got to her feet in parliament to announce it. By which time, it was all over TV screens, radio bulletins, the City, social media. It enabled Tory leader Kemi Badenoch to produce a response that was her most powerful parliamentary performance to date, in which she not only demanded Reeves’ resignation but made it such a personalised assault that left any notion of ‘sisterhood’ sympathy moribund.
The word ‘liar’ is verboten in the Commons but Badenoch — desperate to out-Farage Farage — is deploying it liberally everywhere else at every opportunity. You sense she rehearses it in the bathroom mirror first thing every morning. (*SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn neatly defied the L-word ban by reading out a letter from a constituent who used it about the chancellor.)
Resignation, so far, has been limited to that of OBR chief Richard Hughes who did the decent thing, falling on his sword over a junior staffer’s unprecedented blunder. But as a free agent, he could yet prove a significant figure in Rachel Reeves’ own fate. The fact he withdrew from a scheduled Treasury Select Committee appearance on Tuesday might offer only temporary relief in Downing Street.
Despite the OBR’s howler, Hughes probably found some consolation in the tone of Tuesday’s papers. Take the Telegraph’s splash, ‘Reeves clings on as OBR chief silenced’, the ‘i’ paper’s ‘OBR chief forced out after contradicting Chancellor over Budget black hole’.
Fall guy for the government?
The Mail front page was dominated by capped up, ‘A GOVERNMENT WITH NO SHAME…THE FALL GUY FOR REEVES’ BUDGET LIES’. It went on with, “Tories accuse chancellor of using the OBR chief who exposed the truth about her financial ‘black hole’ as a ‘human shield’ after he’s forced out over leak row.” While ‘Reeves chickens out of facing the music’ was the headline over a double pager attacking the chancellor for sending her deputy to answer Commons questions on Monday while she prioritised an investment conference in Wales. Columnist Dan Hodges weighed in with the headline claim: ‘Ministers are now telling Starmer he can’t afford to keep Reeves on — she’s ‘radioactive’.’
Monday’s Mail (December 1st) splash was dedicated to, ‘FARAGE: REEVES MUST FACE SLEAZE PROBE OVER BUDGET LIES’. Note the absence of any quotation marks around ‘lies’. Note, too, that the Reform leader continues to get more op-ed opportunities than Badenoch.
The Times headlined a 2-page spread, ‘Serious gaffe was the final straw after fractious budget build-up’. Again, the underlying suggestion that Reeves and her boss next door were over eager to blame game the OBR as camouflage for its own cockups.
Resisting an ethics probe
It’s little wonder that the Conservatives are opportunistically demanding the Financial Services Authority investigate whether Reeves’ conduct during the pre-budget build up constitutes a breach of regulatory law. Little wonder, either, that Nigel Farage’s Reform are demanding Keir Starmer’s independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus investigates Rachel Reeves’ conduct as a potential breach of the ministerial code; something the prime minister is resisting strongly.
Inevitably, Kemi Badenoch repeated her attack on Rachel Reeves at PMQs this week, calling for her resignation and even prosecution, while the prime minister angrily defended his chancellor’s integrity, rejecting the accusation she had misled the public or created a ‘false market’ in the City.
But with the Lib Dems and the SNP also highly critical of Reeves’ pre-budget ‘pitch rolling’ behaviour, Sir Keir knows his own position — not just that of his chancellor — would be in peril should any official investigations find against Reeves. Suddenly, ‘pitch rolling’ is a term you’ll hear regularly down at the Dog & Duck and not limited to cricket afficionados following the Ashes or political wonks having a pint.
Watching both Reeves and Starmer’s performances on camera amid the post-budget furore sometimes had me rivalling Iannucci’s creation Malcolm Tucker in the 4-letter word stakes. At times, I fancied I’d seen rabbits caught in headlights looking less startled than the chancellor facing media questions.
Smelling blood
Unsurprisingly, the right-wing papers can smell blood, fuelled further by the knowledge that they too were ‘suckered’ into accepting the chancellor’s pitch rolling strategy over that manifesto-breaking basic income tax increase. (*A declaration of interest here: Although I’m a (far from uncritical) Labour sympathiser who argued against the manifesto pledge, I believe Rachel Reeves is undeniably guilty of misleading and arguably of lying ahead of the budget and ought to resign. The whole fiasco also plays into another recurring theme of this column, the Starmer Number 10’s potentially fatal Achilles heel, its communications incompetence.)
A few sample headlines speak volumes… Take the Daily Mail’s November 28th ‘‘Liar’ Reeves must go now: Chancellor accused of ‘deliberately crashing the economy’ with Benefits Street Budget and faces call to resign after ‘lying to the nation’.’ The Mail’s front page that day also trailed a double page inside spread billed as, ‘What today’s residents of TV’s Benefits Street say about Reeves’ welfare bonanza’.
The Mail’s splash the morning after the budget had swiftly set the tone with an image of the Chancellor posing with her Red Box and the headline, ‘With a smirk that says if you work hard and save prudently I’m coming for you, Reeves launches… Spiteful raids on strivers — to lavish billions on Benefits St’.
Strivers versus shirkers revisited
Similar ‘Benefits Street’ strivers versus shirkers attack themes featured in The Sun, Telegraph and Express and there’s no doubt it will be a divisive, ugly debating point in print and on air over the coming months, and probably right through to the next general election. At times, The Sun coverage revived echoes of the ultra inflammatory Kelvin MacKenzie era.
(*Another personal declaration: While I broadly supported Starmer / Reeves ‘moral mission’ to scrap the 2-child benefit cap, I’ve argued that it also needed to be linked to a more effective crackdown on the very real problem of benefit fraud.)
Both the prime minister and his beleaguered chancellor rightly flagged up that two thirds of those who will benefit are hardworking families on low wages and not workshy skivers spending their days watching TV, playing computer games while swigging beer and smoking dope. Alas, that message has been swamped by the negative headlines and the overall, own goal perception that neither Starmer nor Reeves can be trusted.
2026: The year of living dangerously
A short-term benefit of the 2-cap removal is that for Number 10, it postpones any major backbench revolt or leadership shenanigans into 2026. But next year carries a ticking timebomb over any further concessions over Angela Rayner’s flagship workers’ rights legislation; the former deputy prime minister is clearly on early leadership manoeuvres and could easily rally a significant left-wing rebellion if she and her allies decide Downing Street is bowing too much to pressure from the business lobby.
How to reverse that elusive lost trust handicap — ‘Mission Impossible’ is how some of my Labour MP contacts glumly put it — is Starmer’s overriding challenge before next May’s elections in Scotland, Wales and parts of England when, short of a dramatic poll turnaround, the results look set to provoke a serious challenge to the prime minister, regardless of whether Rachel Reeves survives in situ.
In media terms, this whole beyond satire budget soap opera has made it much easier for right-wing headline writers and leader writers than for their counterparts on left leaning titles.
What’s the point, asks Rawnsley?
Take the Observer headline on Andrew Rawnsley’s column last Sunday. ‘What is the point of this Labour government? The budget offered no compelling answer.’ Rawnsley, a doyen of pro-Labour columnists, offered: “One gloomy assessment from within Labour’s own ranks is that this failed to be the game-changing budget needed by a deeply unpopular chancellor hitched to a deeply unpopular prime minister presiding over a deeply unpopular government. In so much as it has moved the dial of public opinion, it is in a more negative direction.”
Rawnsley also flagged up the paradox that most of the tax rises Reeves DID introduce will impose spending squeezes on the public just when Labour is likely to be facing a general election. “That is a sub-optimal strategy for trying to win a second term for Labour. This element of the chancellor’s arithmetic has the pungent whiff of the dodgy accountancy that she rightly castigated the Tories for when they were in office. If things go very right for the government, the increased fiscal headroom created by the chancellor could turn into a war chest to scatter sweeteners at the voters before the next election. If things go awry, then Ms Reeves, or whoever inherits her poisoned chalice, will be coming back for even more tax increases.”
Did you forget Kwasi, Kemi?
But Rawnsley did find space to debunk Badenoch’s Commons rant that Rachel Reeves will go down in history as “the country’s worst-ever chancellor”, suggesting the name Kwasi Kwarteng “must have slipped her mind even though they all sat together in Liz Truss’s cabinet”.
His payoff line was certainly on the money… “A great peril for Labour is that its enemies will successfully define the government’s primary purpose as higher taxes for more welfare. That has rarely been a recipe for either national prosperity or electoral success.”
There was only limited comfort from the Guardian’s star political sketch writer, John Crace, in his December 1st column headlined, ‘Does Labour have a death wish or does it secretly enjoy the agony of self-sabotage?’. Opined Crace: “Keir Starmer may be keen to move on from the budget megashambles, but chaos is hardwired into his party… Up till now, it’s been tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. That being in opposition for 14 years has made them ring rusty. That they’ve forgotten how this government thingy works.
“But now it’s starting to look like Labour has a death wish. Not that it doesn’t quite know how to run the country, more that it is hell-bent on self destruction. This isn’t a matter of incompetence: it’s a deliberate act of self-sabotage. Almost as if it doesn’t quite believe it deserves to be in office, or is too self-conscious to be in power. The opposition benches are its feelgood safe space.
“How else to explain the feeling of chaos that has underscored much of the last year and a half or so and drowned out the good things that have been achieved? First it was the freebies — from a party that had promised to be different from the Tories. Then there were U-turns over benefit cuts.
“But this was all a warm up for the main event. The budget megashambles. Months of leaks, briefings and press conferences. Some of which only took place to reverse-ferret on what had been said in previous leaks, briefings and press conferences.
“OK, the reaction from the Tories and some lobby journalists has been deranged. The idea that Rachel Reeves was somehow deliberately misleading the country and was guilty of market manipulation is a characteristically desperate response from Kemi Badenoch. There’s no stick that Kemi can’t find the wrong end of. She now has the alarm set on her phone to call for the chancellor’s resignation every four hours. It’s also a bit much for her to expect the country to forgive and forget what the Tories did to the economy. But a less shambolic lead up to the budget could have nipped all this in the bud.”
Enter the acid queen
The Guardian’s award-winning acid queen, Marina Hyde, was hardly comforting, either, with her December 2nd column headlined, ‘Reeves and Starmer are a two-for-one deal — if she goes, he goes. What a cheering thought.’ With Hyde declaring: “It’s week two of budget black hole gate. When will it end? Probably after the May elections.”
Mischievously, she mused: “The chancellor’s endlessly self-referenced black hole seems to have been a multi-billion pound surplus. Astrophysically speaking, there may be precedents for what Reeves did. Back in 2019, some astronomers reported the discovery of a Milky Way black hole so massive that it actually contradicted known stellar-evolution theory. Unfortunately, follow up research revealed the black hole didn’t actually exist at all, and was just an illusory light effect. Quite embarrassing at Big Astronomy’s annual Christmas drinks, no doubt, but obviously much less cosmically excruciating than Reeves weirdo press conference nearly four weeks ago, in which she kept warning she was facing ‘the world as it is’.”
Starmer? Hyde concluded: “Let us take a highly scientific quantum leap to Prime Minister Keir Starmer who is also, unsurprisingly, attempting to butch things out. “I am proud to have scrapped the two-child limit,” Keir intoned in a speech designed to shore up the budget, “proud to have lifted half a million children out of poverty”. Fascinating to hear that Starmer is extremely proud of doing something he last year suspended seven of his MPs for voting for.”
Budget or bodge-it
For its non-partisan part, The Economist produced a cover sketch of a slightly harassed looking Reeves with her red box and the headline pun ‘Britain’s bodge-it’. Inside, a stern, doom-laden leader warned: “Britain is in alarming decline. Its paltry productivity growth, high borrowing costs and incoherent economic policy are bad enough. But the country also risks the collapse of the political centre ground.
“The combined polling share of the populist-right Reform UK and populist-left Green parties now exceeds that of the Labour and Conservative parties, the duopoly that has dominated British politics for over a century. The brutal truth is that eventually, one way or another, radical change is coming to Britain. Either today’s centre-left government will choose the dramatic change that fixes the economy, or change will be forced upon the country by the financial markets or by voters stampeding towards the extremes.”
Rachel’s a hot panto ticket
Next week, the chancellor must face the post budget cross-party select committee grilling Richard Hughes’ resignation allowed him to skip. Dare I suggest it just could be the hottest pantomime ticket in town this Christmas? But with little immediate chance of a handsome prince emerging to rescue ‘Cinderella’ Reeves from the broken glass slipper of her ‘bodge-it’. Whether ‘Rachel from Accounts’ is around to reprise her lead role next year is the big question. Ditto, you suspect, Keir Starmer.
Stop press:
A new political storm erupted on Thursday with the revelation the government plan to postpone four mayoral elections in England scheduled for next May. The official reason is that the local authorities need until 2028 to organise the structural changes required. But the Tories, Reform UK, the LibDems and Greens were united in accusing Labour of proposing the delay for fear of a ballot box defeat. They plan to challenge the plan.
Tory shadow cabinet member James Cleverly accused the government of “subverting democracy” while Reform claimed it was an attempt to “cheat” them out of the victories the polls currently predict.
