Chancellor’s Crumbling Confidence Caught on Camera – Guido Fawkes

It’s a brutal business, politics. When you’re down, your colleagues find ever-crueller ways of pushing you further down. 

At PMQs just now, Old Weepy’s enemies moved in to get their knives wet.

They did it by patting her arm as if to say, “No, your eyes don’t look in the least puffy. It’s pure misogyny. Do you want to borrow my hanky? You’re the first female Chancellor, they can’t take that away from you. That and the first Chancellor to – you know. We’ll all look back and laugh!”

Her bond-market face really isn’t ready for public view. She still has the stress-related cottonmouth problem; her pain is most apparent when she smiles; she makes an effort to listen, to laugh, to look involved – she takes a deep breath and then something dies inside her, her face settles on the edge of the table in front of her and she is alone with her sorrow. 

Alone but for the 1.5m watchers meming her grief.

It’s worth noting because the markets certainly are. 

What she is giving us to realise – after their efforts to talk backbenchers round on Welfare – is that she and her sister are not just disliked in the party but entirely disrespected. That they are not a power couple but powerless. That her non-negotiable fiscal rules are chaff, a slogan, a bit of feminine fluff. That the economist thing she’s been doing is a cross-dresser’s fantasy. That she hasn’t understood incentives, or demand curves, or markets or even the politics of economics. 

And that come the autumn, it’s all getting much, much worse. Her private face is the public image of a Chancellor who lied about her CV, inflated her knowledge and single-handedly crashed a nation’s economy. 

She does regularly achieve one remarkable thing: she makes Keir Starmer look better. 

Now, he – and bear with me on this – for all his many, many defects, he is underestimated by his opponents (his enemies know exactly what his merits are). 

The Tories keep asking him questions that don’t deserve an answer. They set him up to make outrageous claims about soaring business confidence, record growth and how he’s crushing illegal migration. The conviction with which he says these things is remarkable. Insulated by office, his resilience is psychotic. In the Chamber, he is able to project himself as prime ministerial – and that’s where PMQs need not be the irrelevant mish-mash it is widely known to be.

Tories seem to think their accusations will play so well for them on social media that they can ignore the effect in the Chamber. 

And so we get these Tell It To The Hand exchanges

“Will the prime minister agree he’s a total failure who gets everything wrong and breaks everything?”

The PM rises: “You get everything wrong and break everything. We are fixing everything you broke.” 

The way to damage him – I speak as someone who knows more about this than a Christian would admit – is to make him lose his temper. And that is achieved by asking him proper questions that reveal his ignorance, his incapacity, his amateur status. By what date will wind subsidies be lifted? How many millionaires have left the country in the last six months? How much has the VAT increase on school fees cost the Exchequer? What is the fiscal impact assessment of a wealth tax? At what point does he expect Laffer effects to kick in?

Of course, kindness is the real killer, as the Chancellor found, today. But that level of guile is beyond Kemi, an amateur in her own way. Maybe her strategy of waiting for Keir to come to grief will work in the end, she is certainly finding her voice. It would be nice to see the PM undergoing the same psychological collapse as his Chancellor. 

It is the audacity of hope. 

Nigel Farage got a question, as he seems to every month or so. The barracking was prodigious. Not just from Labour across the aisle but from Iqbal Mohamed behind him – his sledging was loud enough to intrude on the Reform leader’s microphone. It eventually exasperated Parliament’s most even-tempered MP. 

The recording of the session went: “The country demands, that you say to the French President will you shut up? That you say to the French president …”

There was laughter. 

They won’t all always be laughing. Keir’s one-in-one-out doesn’t sound like a solution the electorate will understand. Fifty thousand legal asylum seekers claiming sanctuary on the “chicken nugget” principle is probably worth 50 Labour seats to Reform.