What is the purpose of Mel Stride? I don’t ask this to be personal I just genuinely don’t know. In some ways it’s a problem for all shadow chancellors: the Treasury is the most practical of departments, the opposition can only theorise about it. The economy ought to be the only trump card the Tories have left. They’re essentially in a game of strip-poker wearing only their socks and with one ace left – namely, the fact that the economy is going to tank even more when people learn the true extent of Rachel Reeves’s incompetence at the Budget. Meanwhile Reform’s spending plans might as well have been typed up in Babylonic cuneiform. They bear as much relation to reality as a Beckett play transcribed by a baboon. It’s odd then, that the Conservative party has put its greatest area of potential strength in the hands of a man not exactly over-burdened with natural charisma.
Mr Stride seems to know that, as both a shadow chancellor for a struggling opposition party and as a man not blessed with communication skills, he needs to do quite a lot to grab people’s attention, even in a hall filled with people who have ostensibly paid to listen to him. He has adopted of late a sort of weirdly energised persona. This, alongside his rather corporate appearance, makes for an odd combination. He gives the impression of a man who eats a combination of paperclips and raw glucose.
Even the decor was gesturing to his peculiar delivery, reminiscent of a chartered accountant excited by a new tax year. Screens emblazoned with the phrase ‘Responsible Radicalism’ flanked Sir Mel. What on earth that’s meant to mean is anyone’s guess: committing arson attacks with a fire extinguisher to hand? Wanting to replace the House of Windsor with the Inland Revenue?
We began with a description of what Sir Mel had done on his holidays. The shadow chancellor talked about Silicon Valley in the same way that the Jellicle Cats talk about the Heaviside Layer. Presumably he hopes one day to boldly ascend to a non-executive directorship there. ‘I glimpsed’ he said, ‘everything from driverless cars to humanoid robots’. Again, I hate to break it to Sir Mel but he could have found both much closer to home, in fact either could be a metaphor for the Conservative party.
Next came a vow directed at businesses that ‘we will never give up on you. We will always be there for business’. This bizarre, shouted mash-up of the Friends theme tune and Rick Astley might go some way to healing the infamous remark of one B. Johnson about doing to business what he allegedly did to Jennifer Arcuri. Well, it might if anyone was listening.
In part of his drastic attempts to escape the beige and boring, Sir Mel provided us with some particularly fruity visual images. Some of his metaphors suggested he’d had some LSD on his Special K. They made the Jellicle Cats look mainstream. He launched into a segue about Mrs Thatcher and Richard Branson on the Thames ‘with the light playing on the water like an endless stream of opportunity.’ Finally we had an answer to what the love child of Keats and Alan Sugar would sound like. He compared Labour to a U-turning car and went into a dissection of Reform’s spending plans which involved a bizarrely detailed description of a shimmering sequin dress. Whether, in Mr Stride’s bizarre mind-palace, this was worn by Nigel Farage or not doesn’t bear thinking about.
There was some meat; the abolition of business rates and a first jobs bonus for young people. The question that remains hovering over the Tory conference is whether they will ever get the chance to take these policies out of Mr Stride’s carnivalesque imagination and put them into practice.
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