Rachel Reeves is no longer ‘boring’

Rachel Reeves was once branded ‘boring snoring’ by a BBC editor. Today, she was more of a Scary Mary in her speech to conference, repeatedly casting herself as an Iron Lady whose iron discipline would make it difficult for any of her colleagues to get any money for their pet spending projects. In the decade since she was dissed as being dull, Reeves has grown in confidence and stature, and the speech she gave today was really very good: energetic and forceful to the extent that many of those shadow cabinet colleagues watching on the conference floor looking a little scared of her.

Some of those colleagues have already given their speeches: this morning’s conference session saw shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and shadow defence secretary John Healey speaking, followed by a session themed on work and business that included shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall and shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds. All quite different politicians, but there was one striking similarity about their speeches: not much that was new. Reeves’s speech was policy rich, while the rest of the shadow cabinet have been left to set out what Labour stands for in their brief, rather than any detail of what they’ll be doing specifically. Kendall, for instance, listed the groups who had been ‘written off’ and left ‘on the back foot’ by the Conservatives, before promising that ‘under Labour this will change’. She gave some hints at what that change might look like, including ‘recruiting thousands more mental health staff and overhauling skills’ and ‘transform employment support so it’s tailored to individual and local needs’. She reiterated what the party has already pledged, which is to reform Universal Credit and a new cross-government child poverty strategy. Healey pledged to accelerate the £2 billion pledged by the government for new stockpiles, while Lammy announced a new whistleblower scheme for those who exposed kleptocracy in the form of stolen assets.

All of them have had a clear script given to them by Starmer’s office. All the speeches contained repeated uses of ‘together we will’, and they ended similarly with the slogan about giving Britain its future back. ‘Together, we will build a brighter Britain. And give our country its future back.’ Or ‘Together – we can win, together – we will give Britain its future back’. and ‘With Labour, this is the Britain we will build.’

Keir Starmer’s aim with this conference is to answer the question of ‘if not the Tories, why Labour?’ But there is currently a bit of a gap between the ‘we will build a brighter Britain’ and the iron discipline of Rachel Reeves’ speech, which had less of a vision of how Britain might tangibly change. And with her shadow cabinet colleagues also constrained in how much spending they might be able to allocate to their areas, the answer to ‘why us’ isn’t ‘things are going to change dramatically’.