Panic stations. Rachel Reeves arrived at the CBI conference and it was apparent her Budget had gone down like a bad langoustine. In the audience, looking distinctly dicky, were all those business bosses she courted at chi-chi lunches before the election.
Poisoned by the prawn cocktail offensive, nurse. Poor blighters. They’ll be emptied out and it could be years before they can even say hello to a potted shrimp.
Company bosses felt ‘milked’ by the Chancellor’s tax raid and were predicting job cuts. A bigshot from the world of biscuits indicated he would not invest in Starmer’s Britain. Despite all that schmoozing – Hobnobbing, you could say – the man from McVitie’s thought the government was crumby.
The Chancellor, needing to soothe her bilious new friends, started quacking dementedly. ‘We are never going to have to do another Budget like that again! We are not going to have to come back for more! We’ve wiped the slate clean! We’ve set the spending envelope!’
She was on a loop and pulled her mouth into a rictus. The message reminded one of Michael Caine’s Italian Job line. She’d only been ‘supposed to blow the bloody doors off’ but has wrecked the whole caboodle. She claimed that investment was pouring into the country. This was so at odds with the testimony of Mr Biscuits that it was embarrassing.
Ms Reeves was talking during a ‘fireside chat’ on the conference stage. Her interlocutor was Keith Anderson, head of Scottish Power. He crossed his legs and stared down awkwardly at his plaid golfing socks.
These conferences used to be sartorially sober but the CBI’s new president, Rupert Soames, was wearing a tank-top. Good man. We tank-toppers need to stick together.
Jurgen Maier, chairman of Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy, was in the sort of shirt you might wear to a Bournemouth discotheque. Mr Maier was not entirely helpful to his Government. He accepted that more had to be done to persuade the public of Red Ed’s Net Zero plans.
Rachel Reeves’ Budget went down like a bad langoustine at the CBI annual conference today, writes QUENTIN LETTS
The Chancellor promised business leaders that ‘we are never going to have to do another Budget like that again’
Ms Reeves’ claims that investment was pouring into the country were at odds with the testimony of industry bosses
At the Commons later I happened to see Mr Miliband enter the chamber just before Sir Keir Starmer. They were there for tributes to John Prescott. Ministers are normally punctiliously respectful of the PM but not Ed.
He slapped Sir Keir on the back and rubbed his shoulder, taking ownership of him. There was little doubt which man looked the senior partner. Sir Keir loved it. He beamed at being bigged up by his hero Miliband.
A few months ago there was talk that Sir Keir was tiptoeing away from Net Zero and that he would put the economy first. I’d say Mr Miliband has recovered from that setback. He’s got his teeth back into Sir Keir. What fine teeth they are, too.
As for the late Lord Prescott, Speaker Hoyle recalled that after the old boy stepped down as deputy PM he became ‘active in inter-parliamentary relations’. That was a euphemism for ‘he went on a stonking amount of freebies’.
You may recall that on one, to Poland, he and his playmate Sir Alan Meale, former MP for Mansfield, were accompanied by another comrade, Jim Dobbin. Poor Jim was not up to the pace and hosed back so many vodkas that he pegged it. A post mortem found he was five times over the limit.
In the Commons, MPs paid tribute to former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who died aged 86
The House also discussed the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Priti Patel, for the Tories, thought the only beneficiaries of this peculiar gambit would be terrorists.
The Foreign Office was represented by its young new minister Hamish Falconer, dauphin of Charles. He mumbled, blushed and made elementary boobs in parliamentary terminology, all while wobbling his head and throwing his neck about like a baby giraffe.
Nerves had made him almost as nauseous as those CBI members. He may be a clever lad but he is not yet remotely up to a parliamentary duty such as this.
He claimed that the Middle East was ‘not an issue for grandstanding’. Touching.