Rachel Reeves’s keynote conference speech was not the pivot away from the doom-mongering that Labour’s critics were looking for. Amid a lot of smiling from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, there were no big policy announcements and a lot of pitch-rolling for next month’s “difficult” – read, grim – Budget.
Her first conference speech as Chancellor represented a balancing act. She needed to talk up the dire state of public finances ahead of tax rises in the Budget, while not undermining the prospect of growth – all the while presenting a more optimistic story for voters questioning whether Labour will make the difference it promised. She also needed to reassure both workers and employers that she is on their side. Such things have sunk lesser politicians.
Reeves, who has given the impression of cosplaying George Osborne for the past couple of months, metaphorically shrugged off the high-vis jacket favoured by the former Tory chancellor.
She explicitly rejected the label of austerity coming down the track at the Budget, although this may turn out to be semantics with cuts to government spending yet to be laid out. In fact, she almost contradicted herself with her next sentence, adding: “We must deal with the Tory legacy – and that means tough decisions.”
But Osborne had one advantage that Reeves does not: his running-mate. Back in the Noughties at the height of playing austerity bad cop, Osborne had hug-a-husky, sunlit-uplands David Cameron beside him making the argument for a “Big Society” of charitable enterprise taking the place of state spending.
Reeves, who believes in the state as the “backbone” of a fairer society, seems condemned to deal with the problems as she has been handed them, rather than make a change of argument to suit her. With Sir Keir Starmer alongside her, being all Mr Harbinger of Doom, there is no light and shade, just gloom.
Osborne, with his waspish wit and often unseen charm, suffered a public image problem. Reeves, with her raucous laugh and genuine kindness in private, suffers from a stiffness in public.
But occasionally there are flashes of defiance worth relishing. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about the freebies she had been receiving, she brought interviewer Nick Robinson down with a bump after pointing out that he had enjoyed the same hospitality.
Even though the party won the election, you wouldn’t necessarily think it in Liverpool. Until Reeves’s speech, the Labour conference had the same level of fizz as a bottle of pop left out overnight.
Bewildered and irritated that their hard work on the campaign had been overshadowed by a row about who had bought Reeves and Starmer their new clothes, one delegate put their head to one side in puzzlement and remarked to i: “I just thought they’d be a bit… better.”
“Where is the big retail announcement?” one new MP asked on Sunday upon arrival at the conference. Another looked at the pouring rain and said: “Is this it?”
Reeves’s speech was key to changing that narrative.
Feeling grim at endless headlines discussing whether Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner deserves a vanity photographer at taxpayers’ expense, by Sunday activists – and even some ministers – privately started talking about a “hostile media”. That’s a hoary old Jeremy Corbyn-era party catch-all which basically means: write about what we want you to write about, rather than point out our shortcomings.
By Monday, the mood of the conference had shifted as the number of business delegates outstripped party members. The rain-drenched queue snaked around the block to get in. According to a party source, tickets for business day sold out in 45 minutes. “We should have done dynamic pricing, like Oasis tickets, and got the prices up,” one aide joked.
For ministers, business day is like the TV game show Gladiators, dodging over-eager lobbyists armed with sharpened business cards. Some Labour MPs even arrived to find that their hotel rooms had been given away to a public relations firm, which went down as well as one would imagine.
The highlight of the day was Reeves’s keynote speech. There was a genuinely moving movement when she reflected on the historic achievement of becoming the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer in the office’s 800-year history.
But the main auditorium is still the domain of the party faithful. It was not surprising then that in the hall when Reeves mentioned adding VAT to the school fees of private school children, it got the biggest cheer; the packed loyalists were reminding themselves that despite the Hobbs aubergine trouser suit, Reeves is still one of them.
One of the loudest “woos” from the crowd came when she talked about the “first Labour Budget in 14 years”. That “woo” may turn out to be badly misplaced. Reeves is not joking when she says that it is going to be “difficult” at the Budget next month. She seemed to tackle that head on, making an argument about the necessity of making controversial decisions overall.
“I know that not everyone in this hall or in the country will agree with every decision that I make,” the Chancellor said. “But I will not duck those decisions, not for political expediency, not for personal advantage. I did not take those decisions lightly; I will never take the responsibility of this office lightly.”
Reeves also echoed two Gordon Brown speeches. In his first conference speech as chancellor in 1997, Brown told delegates pushing for increased public spending that a “new Jerusalem” could not be built on a “mountain of debts”.
She also borrowed from his last day as Prime Minister in 2009 when he reeled off a list of what he saw as the New Labour governments’ achievements, concluding: “That’s the Britain we’ve been building together.” Brown, who visited the Treasury recently, would surely approve.
Reeves’s speech appeared to be what conference needed. Someone had clearly told her to e-nun-ci-ate, so her words came out with a new, rather disconcerting pre-cis-i-on. But she won the hall over.
That was needed on the day that the leadership is facing a non-binding but nevertheless embarrassing vote from unions to abandon its policy to means test the winter fuel grant for pensioners. She managed to rescue the Labour conference conversation from one of is-this-it to bridge-to-the-future.
After a successful major conference speech, Brown would take hours to come down from the adrenaline high. Afterwards, towing her sister Ellie Reeves, the Labour Party chairman, the Chancellor swept from the hall.
She almost crowd-surfed the rolling tide of congratulations from Labour delegates as she moved on to her next meeting, with a broad smile on her face as she accepted the plaudits but not the proffered business cards.
Reeves had run the gauntlet of the business and party faithful and survived. She might even have changed the narrative of this conference away from suits, dresses and freebies.
But this speech was a staging post: everyone is just waiting until the Budget.
