John Healey, our new Chancellor, gave a speech designed to soothe the financial markets. Soothe or sedate? Mr Healey probably sent them to sleep faster than a doxepin bap.
He ambled to the lectern mid-morning at the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Coventry. Strong coffee beforehand. It was soon evident why. They should have issued cattle prongs, to prod audience members who started snoring.
The Healey voice whirrs. You sense it is there yet you remain unsure in which corner of the room it has settled. There is just this bucolic bombilation. It is not quite a buzz, more an amiable susurration as it dawdles in the dahlias. You find your eyelids becoming heavy. Your pulse slows. The chin droops.
Give that person a prod!
He is not the first Chancellor to be a boring orator. Geoffrey Howe was humdingingly dull. John Major‘s speeches had the colour and texture of whipped egg white. I used to keep myself awake by staring at his hairy hands and imagining what horrors they committed in that bath with Edwina.
Alistair Darling was charming but his Budgets would leave the Commons in various states of narcolepsy, some MPs with heads back, mouths like sinkholes, others having slumped against colleagues’ shoulders. And yet those Chancellors were not entirely without their merits, so a comatose tone may not intrinsically be a bad thing. It may indicate fiscal caution.
Mr Healey’s speech, sadly, merely exuded continuity. His words were little different from those Rachel Reeves used to utter. He desired growth but would not promise the spending and tax cuts that could create it. He claimed to ‘want to leave a sense of real urgency and imperative’ but there was no concomitant undertaking actually to do anything. One week before the TUC conference, and three before Labour’s, he was probably never going to say anything radical.
He is less obviously a bluffer than Reeves. The eyes do not dart so much – Rachel used to look like a shoplifter – and Mr Healey comes across as more experienced and calm. But the cliches were terrible. We had ‘win-win’, ‘brightest and the best’, ‘let me be clear’, ‘acting at pace’ and ‘defining mission’. These were typed in his script. Why does no special adviser edit such atrocities? Do political aides not understand how language can kill interest?
The Healey voice whirrs. You sense it is there yet you remain unsure in which corner of the room it has settled. There is just this bucolic bombilation, writes Quentin Letts
Meanwhile, Angela Rayner made a triumphant return to the Commons front bench, mispronouncing Worcester as ‘Whirrchester’
Mr Healey has a slender face, long chin and a forehead that often wrinkles. His upper lip lifts at the left, baring larky teeth. Had he a little more hair, the effect would be vintage Leonard Rossiter. If he leaned backwards and put his hands on his hips he would basically be a bald Reggie Perrin.
He began by praising his ‘brilliant Treasury team – James, Dan, Lucy.’ Pause. Then: ‘Torsten’. Fancy that: almost forgetting Torsten Bell. The speech’s buzz-phrase was ‘growth in every postcode’. He blamed the Tories for lack of growth in those postal codes: ‘Cameron’s austerity, Johnson’s hard Brexit, Liz Truss’, plus Thatcher-era deindustrialisation.
Even as he spoke, just down the road, Jaguar Land Rover was axing 4,000 jobs. Maybe Labour’s high energy and employment costs had something to do with that. As for Ms Truss, Labour has now zoomed past her record on gilt costs.
Having complained about Brexit, Mr Healey boasted about the trade deals that, er, Brexit made possible. He claimed the credit for interest rate cuts. When a reporter mentioned the possibility interest rates could soon rocket, that was attributed to global factors.
The venue by this point resembled the day room of an old people’s home, the audience in various stages of poleaxed slumber.
Which leaves room briefly to report that Angela Rayner made a triumphant return to the Commons front bench, mispronouncing Worcester. It popped out as ‘Whirrchester’. John Prescott used to beam when he mangled words. Ditto Mrs Rayner. Beside her sat Matthew Pennycook, her deputy. For a few precious months he thought he had escaped Big Ange. Now she is back.
Poor old Pennycock’s expression was unbearably tragic.
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