Rachel Reeves didn’t just point the finger at the Tories – she crucified them

The chancellor was relentless: a £22bn black hole of unfunded promises. The national reserves not just blown, but double-spent. She did not quite bellow ‘J’accuse’, but that was the gist, writes Joe Murphy

‘Her tone was one of ice-cold anger – like a company shareholder explaining why he had needed to call in the fraud squad following the departure of a dodgy accountant’ (BBC)

Rachel Reeves walked into the chamber wearing a funeral director’s expression that quelled any hurrahs on the Labour benches. Backbenchers took one look at her baleful glare and quietened down.

Opposite, Jeremy Hunt simmered petulantly. He had seen an advance copy of her statement and knew what was coming. Around the chamber, expectations sharpened, the mood intensified. This was shaping up to be more important than some end-of-term knockabout statement.

Indeed it was. It was a defenestration. A political and economic disembowelling of the last government.

“Mr Speaker, on my first day as chancellor of the Exchequer, I asked Treasury officials to assess the state of public spending,” Reeves began. “That work is now complete.”

Her tone was one of ice-cold anger – like a company shareholder explaining why he had needed to call in the fraud squad following the departure of a dodgy accountant. “First, I will expose the scale – and the seriousness – of what has been uncovered,” she scowled.

Most people’s image of Reeves is probably the video they keep playing on 24-hour news channels of her walking up Downing Street on 5 July looking awfully pleased with herself. But she told us how she had discovered, in her first weeks in office, that “there were things I did not know. Things that the party opposite covered up.”

Hunt crossed his legs awkwardly, adopting what psychologists might interpret as a stressed position. Now he began fidgeting and muttering “Rubbish.”

But Reeves was relentless. A £22bn black hole of unfunded promises. The national reserves not just blown, but double-spent. She did not quite point a finger across the chamber with a trembling bellow of “J’accuse”, but that was the gist.

On she went: unfunded promises had not been shown to the Office for Budget Responsibility (an allegation that raises questions about what will happen to the Treasury civil servants who did not pass this information to the spending watchdog – presumably a matter at least as deserving of an inquiry as Partygate).

Hunt has never looked so angry. “Absolute rubbish,” he heckled. He seemed to be saying that the reserves had been “managed down”, which is as reassuring as Father Ted saying that the money was just “resting” in his account.

Across the Tory benches, confused faces stared back at Reeves in defeat. Many of these MPs have never been in opposition before, and it showed in their failure to challenge the mighty chancellor who bestrode the house.

Her announcement that the winter fuel allowance was being abolished for 10 million pensioners went over with barely a squeal, not even from the SNP.

Ditto the massive pay rise for junior doctors, which ends the strike. Wes Streeting trolled a teary-looking Victoria Atkins over the despatch boxes, saying: “It took me three weeks”.

Reeves, squeezing maximum headroom, gave a clear signal of tax rises while saying that Labour would abide by what she called “our fiscal rules”, which sounded like a hint of new, perhaps looser, such rules in the next Budget.

Hunt was classy in response, replying forensically and spiritedly to her allegations. It was “a cock-and-bull story about how bad everything is” that would “fool absolutely no one”, he said, accusing Reeves of simply rolling the pitch for tax hikes.

The shadow chancellor pointed out that the deficit was down from 10.3 per cent in 2010 to 4.4 per cent when the Tories left office, inflation was down from 3.4 per cent to 2 per cent, and the UK had the fastest-growing economy in the G7. He was effective but completely outgunned, a lone charge up the beach.

The previously quiet Labour benches now raised a racket. Mr Speaker intervened to tell Keir Starmer’s front bench to “act like a cabinet, not a rabble!”

Sarah Olney, speaking for the Lib Dems, merely rehashed her party’s election attacks on the Tories, making no challenge to the government and offering zero insight into the statement just given.

The day belonged to Reeves, who said in triumph that Hunt and Rishi Sunak should “hang their heads in shame”.

She ended by vowing to “fix the foundations of our economy”, a taunting echo of George Osborne’s 2010 soundbite about “fixing the roof while the sun’s shining” – a tease that, having won with Tony Blair’s playbook, Labour were now rolling out Osborne’s blame strategy to consolidate their power.

Famously, the chancellor was a teenage chess champ and is therefore familiar with the Queen’s gambit: not the TV series about a sassy woman who beats the men, but an opening to a game that aims for domination of the centre of the board.

For this metaphor to succeed, her opponents will be pushed to the fringes and driven to madness and endless defeats. On the evidence of today, the Tory leadership challengers are tumbling over themselves to fall into the chancellor’s trap.

Nominations closed for the Tory leadership race at 2.30pm – and five minutes later, a perspiring Bob Blackman, chief of the men in grey suits, stood in broiling sunshine on College Green to announce the six candidates. Behind him, a man with a “Jesus Saves” placard strolled into camera view. Blackman confirmed that Suella Braverman had dropped out – news that gave her former cabinet colleagues almost as much pleasure as when Liz Truss got the slow handclap.

Blackman proudly revealed a new “yellow card” to punish contenders guilty of “backbiting and attacks on colleagues”. However, when journalists asked hopefully if there would be a red card, the chair of the 1922 Committee conceded that the preservation of law ’n’ order among Tory MPs is reliant on their “embarrassment” at being ticked off. This may be overconfidence on his part, since anyone remaining in today’s Conservative Party must possess a seriously high embarrassment threshold.

Hacks were eager to get back in the shade, and there was an uncomfortable silence when Blackman invited more questions. “I’ve got a question,” pitched in the Jesus Saves man. “What about Jesus?”

Meanwhile, the current frontrunner, Kemi Badenoch, revealed in The Times that what truly antagonised voters on 4 July was “postmodernism that can best be described as joyless decadence”. Finger on the pulse of the nation, that one.

Braverman, explaining her withdrawal to The Daily Telegraph, listed “pedicabs” as one of the mistakes of the Sunak era. Of course! A bill to regulate rickshaws in London’s West End was the last straw.

Saving the Conservative Party might test even the powers of the almighty himself...