Bottom of the barrel
How can Rishi look so weak next to Johnson?
WHO would you trust more to have a handle on your household finances? A newly-married 31-year-old former accountant from Dingwall who is expecting her first child, a 34-year-old mum who has been on benefits – or an ex-Goldman Sachs guy in a handmade shirt and £1,300 suit who was head boy at uber-posh Winchester College and whose wife, the daughter of a billionaire, is richer than the Queen?
My money – which, like yours, diminishes in real-terms value with every week that passes – is on either of the first two.
Kate Forbes is the former accountant, in case you hadn’t guessed, while the other is food writer, activist and antipoverty campaigner Jack Monroe.
The third contender for your trust is Rishi Sunak, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who delivered the Spring Statement in the House of Commons last week.
Ms Forbes is Mr Sunak’s counterpart at Holyrood and the SNP MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.
As such, she has no say in which financial levers the UK Government chooses to play with. But in the wake of a ho-hum Commons performance by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, it fell to her to hit the airwaves and point out the one or two (or eight or a dozen) ways in which Mr Sunak’s mini-Budget had a touch of the fiscal fiasco about it.
That’s rich!
INTERVIEWED by the London Broadcast Corporation – no, that’s not my name for the BBC, it’s the real name of a talk radio station better known as LBC – she pointed out that Mr Sunak had “driven a wedge” between the poorest and the richest Britons, and (I’m paraphrasing here) done nothing to help tackle the cost-of-living crisis as experienced by people who can’t afford £1,300 suits, whose spouses aren’t the children of billionaires and who don’t own four homes, among them a £7 million Kensington townhouse.
In other words, virtually every man, woman, child and lockdown puppy in the country.
Monroe was on the same page pretty much but she worded it more strongly. “What kind of Government can be repeatedly presented with evidence, from courts, coroners, charities, med professionals, that their swingeing cuts to all the support for the most vulnerable are KILLING PEOPLE, and decides to respond by serving up more of the same, but worse still?” she tweeted on Wednesday, the day of the Spring Statement.
“These privately educated investment bankers turned politicians are NOT YOUR FRIENDS, and they have no desire to be.”
Economic think-tank The Resolution Foundation pitched in too, but with fewer capital letters.
They characterised Mr Sunak’s “refusal” to help low and middle-income families as “indefensible”, while pointedly noting that his announcement of a penny off income tax was a sly nod and a knowing wink to what commentators like to call the Conservative Party “faithful”. The not-so-coded message? I’m a tax-cutter, me. And the Conservative Party faithful do love a tax-cutter.
In fact, cutting taxes is one of the traits they most admire, and should there ever be a leadership contest – perish the thought – it’s the kind of thing they do like to see on the CV of the new chap or chapess.
Road to ruin
PLAYING to the same electoral gallery, Mr Sunak also cut five pence from fuel duty. That’s good news for drivers of SUVs though as an RAC spokesman observed wryly it only takes prices back to where they were a week ago.
And it’s fantastic news for that band of Tory backbench goofballs who make up the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) and who align themselves with climate change sceptics, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The NZSG, led by former Brexit cheerleader Steve Baker MP, thinks aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050 (or, if you prefer, saving the planet from a climate catastrophe that will kill billions) is silly and they want it stopped. Or slowed down. Or at the very least turned back before it can land at Dover.
Oh no, that’s refugees, isn’t it? Anyway, the point is that I’m sure they’re delighted there will be more cars on the road as a result of the Chancellor’s largesse, and thrilled that fewer people will resort to public transport or active travel to go the few miles between home and the gym. The Chancellor, in return, will be delighted that they are delighted because it makes them more likely to throw in their lot with him should there ever be a leadership contest. Perish the thought.
That prospect may have diminished now Mr Johnson has something of import to waffle on about (a war in Europe) and a chance to look vaguely presidential against the backdrop of Nato’s fancy glass-and-chrome HQ in Brussels.
The Chancellor appeared not to know that the product scanner being held up by the petrol station employee was not the gizmo you tap your bank card on
Was it even his car he was photographed filling up? Er, no. It was a Kia borrowed for the stunt
But partygate is still waiting in the wings, biding its time. One day the Metropolitan Police will have to pull the wee string on its investigative party popper and shower that tousled blond head (does he cut his own hair? I’ve always wondered) with whatever irksome conclusions it draws from the 80 or so questionnaires it has sent out.
Prime contender
SO, while mutterings about the Prime Minister’s leadership may be somewhat more muted than at the start of 2022 – there’s nothing like the threat of nuclear war to get a fellow’s approval rating up – the peg on which his Zelenskyy-style military fleece hangs is only marginally less shoogly than before.
And who would replace him? Step forward Mr Sunak, who is known by the sobriquet “Dishy” because he looks good enough to eat – only he doesn’t really, it’s just that anyone sitting next to the sartorial shambles that is Mr Johnson has a major head start in the visual appeal stakes. (Have I mentioned the £1,300 suits and handmade shirts? I have? Forgive me. But they do make a difference.)
According to the latest polling, the Labour Party has a small but significant lead over the Conservatives in England and Wales although it may be as high as 30 percentage points in London.
Despite that, bookmakers offer shorter odds on Mr Sunak being the next Prime Minister than on Sir Keir Starmer. And this despite the fact that in a PR stunt after the Spring Statement aimed at promoting the cut in fuel duty, the Chancellor appeared not to know that the product scanner being held up by the petrol station employee was not the gizmo you tap your bank card on.
It was the gizmo for scanning the can of juice and the Twix he had picked up to prove he is not a robot and is prone to natural human urges. So, has he ever actually been in a shop?
That was the question on everyone’s fingertips as the social media wags weighed in. Was it even his car he was photographed filling up? Er, no. It was a Kia Rio borrowed for the stunt.
In Liz we Truss?
FOR the record, the third favourite for next Prime Minister after Sir Keir Starmer is Liz Truss, the self-aggrandising Foreign Secretary whose time at the Department for International Trade saw it nicknamed “the Department for Instagramming Truss”.
She was once described by a fellow MP as “weird”, and given to standing “much too close” to people when talking to them. Meanwhile, back in a real world occupied by real people – those whose day-to-day lives and financial tribulations Jack Monroe has experience of and Kate Forbes at least a good understanding of – there is only bemusement, head-scratching and a sense of total disconnection.