Have you ever wondered what a less competent Rachel Reeves would be like? If you’re a small business owner, the London Stock Exchange or Sir Keir Starmer, it’s presumably the sort of thing that keeps you up at night. Yet it isn’t just a thing of nightmares – this concept exists in the flesh in the form of Reeves’s sister Ellie. The younger Reeves makes the Chancellor look like Bismarck.
The younger Reeves makes the Chancellor look like Bismarck
She has recently been awarded the role of Solicitor General, which makes her sound like a very senior cottager. Although, frankly, having George Michael, John Gielgud or the bloke who played Old Man Steptoe would have been an improvement at the dispatch box.
Reeves was in the house to answer an urgent question from Robert Jenrick about the government’s ongoing China spy scandal. She did so through gritted teeth, which might explain why so much of it was indecipherable, garbled rubbish.
It was one of the most mangled and meaningless speeches ever to have been put before the House. Which in this age is saying something. She talked about her ‘predesheshors’ as if she’d started the morning with eight pints of lager. ‘Er Er Er’ punctuated her speech; it was like listening to a broken printer or a coffee machine on the blink. She spoke of ‘core tenants’ in the government’s approach. ‘Scrutiny’ became ‘scootiny’. If the St John’s ambulance people had been there, they would have insisted she sat down and had a light flashed in her eyes to check for concussion.
Of course the elephant in the room was the shady presence of the routinely treasonous Lord Hermer, on whose behalf this human banana skin had been summoned to take the flak. ‘When was the Attorney General informed that the case was going to collapse?’ asked Harriet Cross. Reeves-the-Less replied that the AG would set out his evidence in due course. Even the Lib Dems, whose questions to ministers are usually as softball as they come, called for an investigation into why the prosecution collapsed.
Yet this wasn’t just incompetence. There was something more invidious going on. For all her stuttering, Reeves was putting forward the government’s strategy with absolute clarity. Stonewalling, obfuscation and outright deceit about a genuine threat to national security.
When she did manage to pronounce things correctly, this was consistently evident in her speech. Scrutiny was in fact ‘ongoing disinformation’. She ‘couldn’t speak for the Attorney General’ despite the fact that it was exactly what she was in the House to do. It was redolent of the worst examples of double speak from an authoritarian regime. Labour had even planted a North Korean style ‘question’ from the backbenches so excruciating that even Reeves winced when it was asked.
Step forward, John Slinger. The MP for Rugby, in a pretty crowded field must rank as the premier dignity-vacuum of the new intake. A few weeks ago Mr Slinger was the sole MP to defend the decision to hire Lord Mandelson as US Ambassador on the basis that David Cameron had hired Andy Coulson in the 2010s. Today he waxed lyrical about his party’s sensible, pragmatic decision to kowtow to China for economic gain; ‘Can I urge the government to continue Labour’s approach?’ he said to visible discomfort among the few of his colleagues who had bothered to turn up. Reeves, to her credit, looked fairly unimpressed by this display of whimpering deference.
A day of double-speak, dishonesty and dignity-phobic apparatchiks: perhaps the Chinese are already in charge after all.
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