The socially-conscious venue of Coin Street, a community centre in Waterloo; the lectern with a snappy slogan of “A Britain built for all”; the handpicked friendly hype gang of enthusiastic applauders; the carpet floor tiles; the tea and coffee station; the Labour leader pleading earnestly with Britain to give him a chance.
Monday morning’s budget fightback speech by UK prime minister Keir Starmer had a distinctly retro vibe – very summer of 2024. The event felt exactly like one of the umpteen ubiquitous speechmaking rallies he hosted during last year’s election.
Starmer had seemed more comfortable back then, more confident, secure in the belief that Downing Street would soon be his and probably for as long as he wanted it.
On Monday, as he grew exasperated while defending his government’s record to a hostile media, those halcyon days seemed so long ago. Yet it had only been 18 months. The reversal in Starmer’s political fortunes since then has been swift and stunning.
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Downing Street assembled the Westminster press pack on Monday morning for a speech by Starmer to underline what he views as his government’s achievements in office, and also to defend the budget last week of his chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
She was lambasted in British media over the weekend after correspondence released by the UK’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), appeared to undermine her claim that she had to hike taxes to plug a budget black hole of £16 billion. In fact, the correspondence suggested, she knew she had enough spare cash to cover the gap, even when she appeared to suggest otherwise to the British public.
The charge that is levelled at Reeves and Starmer now is that they effectively lied to the British public to justify a left-wing tax-and-spend budget, which, the accusation from Tories goes, they only perpetrated to save their own skins from a Labour rebellion.
“There was no misleading,” Starmer insisted, as questioner after questioner from the Westminster press pack pressed him on the issue. “On the substance of the budget, I’ll defend it any day of the week.”
Later on Monday, the OBR’s chairman Richard Hughes would quit over its accidental leaking of details of the budget last Wednesday. Starmer’s irritation with him was already clear on Monday morning.
The scripted side of proceedings was, like Starmer himself, solid, unfussy, but ever-so-slightly awkward.
The press and the Labour hype gang were assembled at Coin Street, a social enterprise centre in an inner city neighbourhood not far from Waterloo station, an hour in advance of the UK prime minister’s 10.30am arrival.
Starmer had been visiting a school nearby, although this time he managed to avoid the ticking off he got last week from a teacher at another school, after he led children there in a show of the “six-seven” meme, which students had been banned from doing.
The handpicked crowd of charity bosses, local teachers and other Labour-friendly types greeted Starmer’s arrival into the room with suitably rapturous applause, loud enough for the television cameras in the room to pick it up, which was surely the whole point.
Starmer listed his government’s achievements, including freezing rail fares, scrapping the two-child benefits cap (that he and Reeves had previously suggested was unaffordable), free school meals and cuts to health service waiting times.
“This is what a Labour government is for,” he said. Before the budget, his own backbench MPs had been wondering about this as the party struggled in the fiscal straitjacket bequeathed to it by the Tories.
Starmer, sensing that he needed to give his downtrodden troops some hope in the face of difficulty, insisted that there were better days ahead for Britain.
“We have now walked through the narrowest part of the tunnel. In the year ahead, we will see the benefits.”
Then the old stalwarts of the Westminster press pool narrowed their eyes and clobbered the prime minister over what one of them told him was the most “shambolic” budget process he had seen in years.
Starmer, meanwhile, insisted on looking to the political future, apparently assuming that he still has one.
