Andrew Gimson’s Spring Statement sketch: Reeves started to do our headroom in

Rachel Reeves spoke with all the animation of a Soviet apparatchik striving to conceal the preposterousness of the latest Five Year Plan by being very dull indeed.

Aspirational platitude after aspirational platitude fell lifeless from her lips: “The Labour Party is the party of work”, “our commitment to deliver just one major fiscal event a year”, “I have restored in full our headroom”.

Before long she started to do our headroom in. The Labour Party, though the party of work, sat comatose through her performance.

“Promises made, promises kept,” she said at one point, which raised a laugh from some, but she went on to concede that for some reason the OBR’s growth forecast for 2025 has fallen from two per cent to one per cent.

“I’m not satisfied with those numbers,” she admitted, and a few moments later informed the House that “there are no short cuts to economic growth”.

Mel Stride rose in his wrath from the Conservative front bench and accused her of talking the economy down, confecting the £22 billion black hole and recklessly leaving herself with “a sliver of headroom against her fiddled targets”.

Would the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, allow “fiddled”, with its connotation of dishonesty? To begin with he let it pass, but when Stride used it for the third time – “She fiddled the targets” – Hoyle said there were “better words” that could be used.

In answer to Stride, Reeves allowed herself to become animated as she protested her innocence: “When I was left with a sliver of headroom I rebuilt it.”

Sweeping her hand across the Opposition benches, she dismissed the parties there as “the anti-growth coalition”.

As we listened to Reeves, we felt ourselves carried back to the glittering ConHome book awards ceremony held at a North London community centre next to an all-weather pitch on which Sir Keir Starmer once shouted “Give it to Keir”.

The sought-after prize for most prescient book was awarded to Jon Cruddas for his warning, in A Century of Labour published in January 2024, that “it is difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government”:

“Labour often recoils into a default instrumentalism, reliant on capitalist growth to prosper. Such growth looks an unlikely immediate prospect. Stale technocratic social democracy will prove unable to resist the rise of authoritarian populism.”

Reeves now offers stale technocratic social democracy, dependent for its success on capitalist growth.