SKETCH Perspiration seeped from his forehead faster than water crashing down Niagara Falls
THIS was to be his crowning moment, when he would be whooped and cheered, garlanded with flowers thrown by the adoring Tory faithful and, who knows, perhaps the odd pair of frilly bloomers.
Instead, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s entrance into the conference hall yesterday was noticeably light on pyrotechnics.
His walk-on was more of a heavy lumber, those vast, elongated legs of his moving up and down like the languid pistons on an ocean liner.
Sheepishness or exhaustion? Bit of both probably. The late night jitters on Sunday that caused him to jettison abolishing the 45 per cent tax rate had called for a rewrite of the entire speech.
Some strong coffee please, bellboy, and while you’re at it best send up a few packs of Pro Plus.
He had endured, putting it mildly, a pig of a morning. Egg on face followed by a duffing up in the broadcast studios. Rightly Mr Kwarteng didn’t try to sugar coat it. ‘What a day,’ he announced, his Big Bertha voice thundering around the hall. ‘It’s been tough. But we need to focus on the job in hand.’
This was a Chancellor fighting to save his career.
YOU could tell it from the perspiration seeping from his forehead faster than water crashing down Niagara Falls. You could see it from the way his Eric Morecambe specs were fogging up.
The audience could spot it too and actually rather warmed to him as a result. They like a battler in these parts.
It says something, too, that the hall was pretty much full. They even began queuing an hour before the Chancellor was due on stage. I can tell you, they never did that for Philip Hammond.
And what of the speech? Well, there were plenty of policies from the mini-Budget which are still clearly popular.
Whoops went up for the pledge to cut stamp duty and build more homes. Welcomed too was the decision to axe the National Insurance hike. Biggest cheer? His promise to bin meddlesome EU laws. Ah, Tory conference. It never changes. It helped of course that Mr Kwarteng at least sounds Conservative, which is more than can be said about some of his recent predecessors.
At one point he bemoaned the ‘slow-managed decline’ of our economy in recent years and a willingness to accept Britain ‘settling back into middle league status.’
He may as well have held up a voodoo doll of Rishi Sunak and begun jabbing pins into it.
There was no strut or swagger. No place for that after the morning’s humiliation. Humour and triumphalism too were absent.
The closest thing to a gag was a wry observation that his recent
financial proposals ‘might have caused a little bit of turbulence’ which provoked matronly giggles among some female members.
Not everyone was laughing. ‘Not funny,’ growled a man in front of me. An oily looking creature – brown shoes, shiny suit etc. A lobbyist would have been my guess .
Seated directly in front of the Chancellor was the Prime Minister, who’d entered the hall at the start with a cheesewire-tight smile stretched across her face.
By contrast, to one side of Miss Truss was Mr Kwarteng’s short-serving predecessor, Nadhim Zahawi, smiling rakishly. There but for the grace of God and all that.
Yet by the time Mr Kwarteng finished with a flourish about ‘meeting the challenges of a new era’ with ‘grit and determination’ and began making his lugubrious exit off the stage, the PM had visibly relaxed. Turning to her deputy Therese Coffey, she even shot her the teensiest of grins which seemed to say: ‘Could have been worse’.
There isn’t quite the fin de siecle feel around the place that Twitter and all the doomsters and gloomsters would have you believe. Corks are still popping. The beer pumps are flowing.
At breakfast yesterday morning, despite the soul-sapping chaos in the top ranks, I’d spotted several Government ministers cheerily piling their plates high from the conference hotel’s arteryclogging buffet.
When this lot are off their sausages, then it really would be time to sound the alarm.
‘If this lot are off their sausages, it’s time to sound the alarm’