Miss Reeves’ voice sounds like a blocked peashooter
RACHEL Reeves – what about her? Would she be better as Labour leader than Ed Miliband? Come on, team. We need positive thinking here.
She has an economics background, was a chess champion as a child, and worked for the Bank of England before politics. That hairdo i s slinky enough for a Silvikrin advert. And she is artful.
She attended Ed M’s stinker of a speech last week, sat in the front row and managed not to chew her fist. She can say ‘Ed Miliband would make a great Prime Minister’ without promptly howling into a bucket (the reaction of other shadow Cabinet members).
Yet she has also conceded that Labour has ‘lost its raison d’etre’. There is a glint of ambition in this lady.
Weak points: inexperience (b. Feb 1979) and no discernible sense of humour. She was once an ally of Ed Balls but has shimmied away from old Stinkbomb.
The voice is not good. It sounds like a blocked peashooter – on radio you might mistake her for Harold Steptoe, played by the late Harry H Corbett. But engineers may be working on that larynx. The tone has risen slightly. It is almost high enough now for her to join the tenor line.
Miss Reeves – whose younger sister Ellie is on Labour’s National Executive Committee and is more convincing as an orator – was up i n the Commons yesterday. The occasion was questions on Work and Pensions, which she shadows.
Labour’s tactic for the next ten months will reportedly be to ‘toxify’ Government policies. We certainly saw that yesterday.
They moaned about every policy from work capability assessments to personal independence pay- ments to job figures (What? Employment is at a record high!). Labour MPs from Rosie ‘Tommy’ Cooper ( West Lancs) t o Ann ‘ Smiler’ McKechin (Glasgow N) to Stephen ‘All Tories Are Moolti-Millionaires’ Hepburn ( Jarrow) bewailed, deplored, lamented, deprecated the state of the nation.
Not all these jeremiads were entirely genuine.
One of the Welsh lot, Nick Someone, spoke of a ‘fiasco’ in this or that subpod of the welfare system – it was not handing out as much of our money to the poor as Nick Someone wanted.
Mumbling Mike Penning, a minister, said it was absurd to call something a ‘fiasco’ when a recent in- depth report had not found anything as bad as that.
Nick Someone, hearing the minister’s response, laughed in a way that seemed to say ‘fair point, guv, but I was just saying what the Labour Whips told me to say’. It’s all a game, innit?
Mary Glindon (Lab, N Tyneside) produced a hand-held silk fan which she waved under her chin to keep cool during all this human misery. Shades of the bullfight senora. On the Labour front bench Miss Reeves clenched her hands, examined her purple nail varnish and shook her glistening mane.
Once or twice there came a froggy squawk – she was heckling ministers – but on the whole she was a picture of poise.
Houston, we could work on this one. Maybe. She has more potential than dim- l i t Sadiq Khan. Ballsy and his eye-popping missus are fading. Apprentice hotel clerk Dougie Alexander is a non- starter, ditto Arriet Arman.
Miss Reeves lacks the snorting unpredictability of Caroline Flint but that may not be a disadvantage. She does not have Chuka’s eyelashes but she may be more substantial.
THE only problem? There is no intellectual foundation to her case. That is why she is struggling against Iain Duncan Smith. IDS has a few holes in his record but he has bravely taken on the welfare monolith (and the BBC).
Miss Reeves might well rise further in her party but what Labour really needs is philosophical change.
Philip Davies (Con, Shipley) said that it is now the Tories, with their welfare reforms, who have become ‘the party of labour while the party opposite has become the party of layabouts’.
Only when the Left realises that egalitarianism itself is shot, kaput, finito, will it stand a chance of longterm recovery.