Andrew Gimson’s Budget sketch: Reeves inflicted terrible gloom on her own ministerial colleagues

As the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered her second and presumably last Budget, a terrible gloom settled over the ministers sitting behind her. The Prime Minister looked as if he was going to be sick.

On the other side of the Chancellor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury resorted to continual nodding, like one of those dogs which used to hang between the driver and passenger in unfashionable cars.

At the other end of the Treasury Bench, the Energy and Climate Chance Secretary frowned in apparent agony, his staring eyes suggestive of incipient lunacy.

Only the Health Secretary, front-runner in the race to replace the PM, wore an expression of untroubled content. The Home Secretary, who has recently moved into second place in that contest, also looked perky enough, as if she too hopes for better things in the near future.

Everyone other minister felt forced, for just over an hour, to simulate, with varying mixtures of anxiety, embarrassment and incredulity, a ghastly pretence of approval for the Budget.

For no one was this pretence harder to maintain than Rachel Reeves herself. Her words were dull but as she laboured to make bricks without straw, her predicament compelled a degree of interest and even of sympathy.

The Chancellor resembled an apparatchik of the late Soviet period who is striving to present the latest tractor production figures as a triumph, knows she is failing lamentably, but is nevertheless condemned to press on from one dodgy forecast to the next.

In 2030-31, you will be glad to know, there will be a budget surplus of £24.6 billion pounds, and meanwhile we shall spend “£18 million to improve and upgrade playgrounds across England”.

She claimed to be speaking for working people, but proceeded to hand out funds to unworking people, for which working people will have to pay more in tax.

Lifeless phrase followed lifeless phrase, enunciated word by separate word, as if strung together by a mechanical device rather than a human being.

Reeves assured her comrades of “our commitment to the Northern Growth Corridor”, and also to “the Growth Mission Fund”.

But of measures which might stimulate the animal spirits which produce genuine growth there was no sign.

Every so often she resorted to a mirthless pursing of her lips, the best face she could put on a script which sounded as if it had been rewritten a hundred times, but had never become satisfactory, for no script can obviate the need for decisions to control public spending.

Those decisions cannot be taken because the workers and peasants on the Labour benches will not tolerate such control, and must instead be bought off by abolishing the two-child cap.

The Chancellor gathered herself for a final effort. She had already frozen income tax thresholds for a further three years, but now she claimed to be “keeping every single one of our manifesto commitments”.

When Reeves sat down, she was greeted with drilled applause by some of her backbenchers, and for a moment could breathe a sigh of relief that she had managed to get to the end of her speech, rather as one may feel relieved to have got to the end of a tough exam in a difficult subject for which one has not done the necessary homework, and to which one cannot guess the answers.

Kemi Badenoch rose to reply. She observed that Reeves had just suffered “a total humiliation”, and had raised “taxes on anyone doing the right thing”.

Within a few sentences, Reeves started to look sick, for is harder to keep up appearances when one has to sit and listen to one’s work being ripped to shreds.

Badenoch accused the Chancellor of “wallowing in self-pity and whining about mansplaining and misogyny”, and mocked her for preparing the world for a rise in the rate of income tax, only to change her mind three days later.

Reeves strove to look incredulous and ended up looking like a rabbit frozen in the headlights. “God help us,” Badenoch said.

The Leader of the Opposition was in her element. She strode forth as the taxpayers’ champion who by cutting welfare will cut borrowing, and also cut taxes.

“The Labour Party should be renamed the Welfare Party,” Badenoch declared, and took moral satisfaction in telling Reeves, “She should be on the side of people who get up and go to work.”

It is too soon to know whether Badenoch offers what the country will vote for at the next general election, but she did today rub in the Chancellor’s failure, and put clear blue water between the Conservatives and the Government.