You can always tell someone is in trouble when the Prime Minister calls an emergency press conference. A combined force of black cats and magpies arriving at your front door, bursting in and putting new shoes on your table while opening umbrellas inside would be less of a bad omen than Keir Starmer setting up a conference to say how proud he was of you.
The best you can say of the PM was that he looked slightly more comfortable fibbing to camera than his Chancellor did on the Sunday shows
This was exactly what he did this morning, summoning the press pack to a London nursery to discuss last week’s bin-fire Budget. Most of it was his standard fluff; ‘people worrying about the bills’, wanting to end ‘cycles of worklessness and dependency’, (obviously, it included an anecdote about how he knew what all of this was like because he’d been a child in the 1970s) when a Labour government was once again making all these issues worse by raising taxes, chucking money at welfare and making it more expensive to hire people. Even his attempts to exude positivity fell flat. ‘We’ve walked through the narrowest part of the tunnel’, he droned, as if discussing roadworks on the M25.
Again and again, he reiterated how proud he was of Rachel Reeves and the Budget – sometimes to a quite absurd degree. For instance, he claimed that when he told them about last week’s announcements, a group of nurses had ‘broken out in a clap’. Most unfortunate, there are tablets for that.
Sir Keir has a sort of dead behind the eyes delivery style that really comes to the fore when he’s doing one of these press conferences. Deprived of a woman asking what he considers impertinent questions, he just goes into a cycle of blinking incoherence, punctuated by pauses which he mistakenly believes are meaningful. The general vibe is as if one of the Midwich Cuckoos grew up to become a chartered accountant. The best you can say of the PM was that he looked slightly more comfortable fibbing to camera than his Chancellor did on the Sunday shows.
Christopher Hope of GB News asked how his viewers could trust the government’s promises, given Reeves and her colleagues had explicitly lied to the public. Sir Keir blinked, reddened and clucked his disapproval before moving hastily on to talking about ‘free’ breakfast clubs. Asked why the OBR had contradicted the Treasury’s claims, the PM produced some genuinely unimprovable Starmerite bilge. The Budget, he said, was an ‘iterative process’. Even in our parliament of JCR goons and LinkedIn monkeys it is not often one hears such manifest drivel.
Elsewhere there were other signs of the Budget unravelling. Darren Jones, dispatched to set matters straight on the morning media round, complained that the Conservatives had bequeathed them headroom of ‘just £10 billion’. This inadvertently torpedoed last year’s ‘£22 billion black hole’, before you even get to more recent fabrications. Details are emerging of an expletive laden rant in the Budget’s planning stages courtesy of the eternally charming Torsten Bell. End of the line for No.11? It certainly isn’t getting any better and the starting point was hardly a bed of roses.
For all Sir Keir’s attempts to make this an exercise in poverty porn, talking about latter-day Tiny Tims and fictitious cheering nurses, the legacy of the Budget and the political survival of its promulgators both depend on the extent to which their promises can stack up against provable realities. The headlines reflect this; How big is Rachel’s black hole? Can anyone fill it? Did Darren lie about the size of the hole? It’s a real pleasure to live in an age when these are headlines in the FT and not the Sunday Sport.
February 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Kenneth Williams. It’s good to see the government marking his legacy by treating us to a series of innuendo-laden newspaper covers. Still, if they’re going to inflict the economy of the 1970s on us, we might as well have a return to the humour of the 1970s as well.
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