On days like this, it’s not hard to be overwhelmed by existential futility. At the current rate of progress, the UK looks on course to wipe itself out far sooner than it would with any interference from AI. Everything feels hopeless. Years of minimal growth and a cost of living crisis. The tech bros and the bankers may be getting richer. The rest of us? Not so much.
And there’s no end in sight. Andy Burnham may offer better vibes, but he is fighting a losing battle against global forces – wars, energy prices, borrowing costs – that he can’t control. You can feel the hope drain out of him as each day passes. Mr Congeniality is not quite so congenial as he once was. All the economic forecasts suggest things are going to get even worse in the next year.
Even Labour allies are preparing the ground for a tough budget next month. The chancellor, John Healey, has been making it known that even he is surprised by just how bad things are. Can’t think why. The rest of us have known for a while, and he’s had the benefit of sitting at the Cabinet table with Rachel Reeves for the past two years. Perhaps he dozed off while she was speaking. He wouldn’t have been the first.
Still, the government does have one thing going for it. There is currently no one better. That might not be much comfort to some people, but it helps Labour sleep a little easier. Reform members seem determined to take themselves down. If not by financial scandals then by their own stupidity.
That’s why Richard Tice has such a prominent role within the party. Only on Wednesday, Dicky was at it again. Responding to the news that Healey had made the TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak, a non-executive director of the Bank of England, Motormouth Dicky immediately declared Britain had descended into a socialist hell. Were he better informed, he would have known it’s been a tradition for the last 40 years or so that the TUC head honcho gets a gig at the Bank. One started by that well-known Commie apparatchik Margaret Thatcher. But why let that get in the way of an ill-thought through social media clip.
Usually, Dicky is in a league of his own in the competition to be the dimmest and least competent MP in Westminster. But this time Kemi Badenoch was keen to join in with a similar post. As much to remind everyone that the Tory party was still not ready to be taken seriously or forgiven for its 14 years of unmanaged decline as anything else. And where Kemi led, Andrew Griffith followed with his own statement insisting the unions would soon be running the country. You’d have thought that a shadow chancellor, with experience as a junior minister in the Treasury, would have inside knowledge of the Bank of England’s conventions.
There again, Andrew will be Andrew. Living proof of Kemi’s currently insurmountable problem. She can say all she wants that she has changed the party, but all the country sees is more or less the same faces promising that this time everything will be different. Something that’s more or less inevitable when you have a party of fewer than 120 MPs. It takes some cheek to appoint a backer of Liz Truss’s mini-budget as your shadow chancellor. Two fingers to everyone.
Right now, Griffith’s main function appears to be to make people yearn for the return of Mel Stride. The Melster may have been a bit useless, but he always looked as if he was trying to be decent. The Tories have set a lot of store by the fact that Andrew made a lot of money in the private sector before becoming an MP. Yet there is no sign that he can translate those skills into the public sphere. In Westminster, he is most noted for having loaned his £9.5m house to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign team, for declaring that Elon Musk had saved humanity by buying Twitter and that too many Lib Dems were vegans.
On Thursday, Griffith chose to make his debut speech as shadow chancellor at a college in north London. He can only hope that not many people were listening because it rapidly became apparent that he didn’t have much to say. And what he did say was – not to put too fine a point on it – half-arsed and intellectually dishonest.
Where to start? The optics weren’t great. Looking like you’ve been locked in the boiler room by the college principal isn’t the best of looks. Though maybe it would have been better if he had been. There were no apologies, no acknowldgement of the Tories’ part in the current economic state of the country. It was as though July 2024 had been year zero. Everything had been just fine until then and Labour had ruined everything.
“The chancellor must rule out raising taxes,” he said. Something he, himself, is unwilling to do. The Tories have committed to keeping the current tax thresholds until 2028, a stealth tax that raises billions more for the Treasury each year. It was breathtaking. But there was more. Griffith was determined to simplify tax regulation and red tape. Another astonishing feat of amnesia. It had been Andrew who played a key role in the Treasury abolishing the Office for Tax Simplification while in office. He must think we’re stupid.
Surprisingly, he had nothing to say on the one tax cut that Kemi has actually committed to exploring. The abolition of inheritance tax. A proposal that would benefit the wealthiest 5%. So much for being the party of small business and the self-employed. Sometimes, it feels as if the current iteration of the Tories just can’t help themselves. They are their own burial ground.
There was just time for Griffith to reiterate that Nowak’s appointment to the Bank of England was a death knell for the country – you’d have thought he might have wanted to rethink this after a night’s sleep – before he brought the event to a close. Astonishingly, he thought it had all gone brilliantly.
