Reeves has gone from being accused of talking the country down to sounding as if gripped by starry-eyed fantasy. She needs to be careful about her mood swinging too far the other way, writes John Rentoul. There hasn’t been a change of tone like it since the freezing bookkeepers in The Muppet Christmas Carol asked Michael Caine’s Ebenezer Scrooge if they could have some more coal for their fire. When he asks, “How would they like to be suddenly unemployed?” they start singing, “Heatwave!” in hastily donned beach gear.
In such a similar fashion Rachel Reeves switched from the gloom of painful choices needed to fill the £22bn black hole to the sunny optimism of a chancellor announcing that good times are just around the corner. In an interview today, preparing the way for a speech on growth on Wednesday, she said: “We are absolutely fantastic as a country.” She said that Britain could learn from Donald Trump’s unrelentingly pro-USA attitude: “Yes, I think we do need more positivity.”.
Reeves has gone from being accused of talking the country down to sounding as if gripped by starry-eyed fantasy. She said she had been “in sales mode” this week in Davos and that we “shouldn’t apologise” for Britain’s strengths in artificial intelligence, tech and clean energy: “We shouldn’t be all polite about it. We should be shouting from the rooftops.”.
Who can say whether this is a planned change to the next phase of her programme for government or a panicked response to business leaders who have told her that she has overdone the talk about the “worst fiscal inheritance since the war”? It is probably a bit of both. She had to drive home the message that the Tories had left the public finances in a mess, forcing her to make decisions that she hadn’t wanted. But her sternness put a dampener on the “animal spirits” that she now says she wants to see unleashed.
