Green Ed is said by colleagues to be the cabinet minister most angry about the standalone axing of the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners. The word is Miliband was quietly working on a new lower tariff for elderly, vulnerable and low-income households. The £300 payment could have been presented as giving a cash subsidy to highly profitable energy companies, while pensioners wouldn’t lose because suppliers would charge them lower prices. That was a missed alternative route. Rachel Reeves shot the benefit horse before Miliband motorised the cart.
Keir Starmer’s warm-up woman at the TUC Congress, Angela Rayner, dodged all mention of winter fuel at a jolly dinner with the brothers and sisters who gave her a standing ovation on the eve of the PM’s speech. Angela Raver quipped she’d received a warm welcome in Brighton from everybody until Sharon Graham shouted: “It’s a sell-out!” Every other general secretary laughed, as did Graham herself, the government’s noisiest union critic.
With the honeymoon in the country over before the marriage was fully consummated, Labour rebels dig trenches for a long war. The Corbyn-era shadow chancellor John McDonnell, one of seven suspended for voting to lift the two-child benefit cap, has written to the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle. He requested to be properly addressed as a suspended Labour MP rather than an independent because he was elected as Labour. The group would be parliament’s fifth largest. Three more and it overtakes the SNP (nine) to be fourth behind the Libs (72), Cons (121) and Lab itself (404).
Those Limboland rebels are required to continue paying Parliamentary Labour Party fees and abide by the whip, but are barred from meetings, and attend party conference as members, not MPs. One grumbled it is taxation without representation.
Over in Toryland, a group of MPs opened a book on when invisible man Rishi Sunak will formally quit parliament. Early next year is favourite. While Sunak may be California dreamin’, Boris Johnson is milking his own notoriety. He’s charging £50 a ticket at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, £15 more than Judi Dench. One is a national treasure and the other stuffs his personal treasury.
The Oasis ticket rip-off scandal prompted Labour peer Tom Watson to recall drinking Jack Daniels and Coke with Liam Gallagher in Oxfordshire’s flashy Soho Farmhouse. The band’s ageing hellraiser told the party’s former deputy leader he watches PMQs in his north London pad eating, wait for it, quinoa salad. “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”.
[See also: From Labour’s economic plan to the Tory leadership: no one wants to be associated with Liz Truss]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble