My favourite titbit in the increasingly deranged period in the leadup to Rachel Reeves’ second budget yesterday came from a Conservative MP.
Published: 27 November 2025
“You didn’t tell us,” he told the Tory, “how bloody awful being in government is.”
I’m deliberately writing this on Wednesday morning before the chancellor delivers a speech that almost everyone is expecting to be a disaster.
I’ve been following British politics since I moved to England in 1965 and I’ve never known anything like this feeling of hopelessness.
I was on the bottom rung of senior management in the Department of Industry in the 1970s during the short premiership of James Callaghan.
The mood in 1979 was pretty dejected, but it was nothing like as bad as this.
Many of us thought the government clapped out, but whatever our politics, we were loyal and did our jobs as best we could.
I visited factories and spoke enthusiastically to businessmen (they were almost always men in those days) about the Industrial Strategy, about which in many ways I was sceptical, but I extolled its virtues.
After only a year of Keir Starmer’s reign, a third of those who voted Labour regret it.
Those running the government machine are in a state of borderline panic.
It’s not just that the young government has little relevant life experience, but that it seems incapable of learning.
Coasting on its landslide victory it came into office bursting with an arrogance that surpassed even its immense ignorance.
They knew so little, they didn’t even know what they didn’t know.
As I was saying plaintively from the very early days, wouldn’t you think that Starmer might at least have dipped into the memoirs of predecessors like Tony Blair who wrote eloquently of his discovery that he didn’t know how to make the levers of government work?
And how he learned his job.
Couldn’t Reeves have consulted some of her predecessors, most of whom would have been disposed to give helpful advice for the sake of the country?
Nope.
Humility is not an attribute they prize.
Like a lying child, they are in denial.
“Rachel Reeves has fixed the foundations of the economy” is one of the ridiculous lies we are fed.
It is blindingly obvious to the average person that with very few exceptions this government doesn’t know what it’s doing and our economy is in peril.
It talks of its commitment to growth, while introducing at every possible juncture job-killing regulations or taxes to please its left-wing MPs, for Starmer, who has no political nous whatsoever, can’t manage his own party.
And simultaneously, in the name of equality, it is driving those who pay most taxes out of the country.
And then there’s the prime minister’s suicidal devotion to international human rights legislation above our national interest.
There is a kind of terror abroad as people grasp that these people — many of whom mean well but haven’t a clue — could be in power for almost four more years.
I fear there will be no plump rabbits coming out of the Treasury hat.
