There are, quipped Gordon Brown, only two types of chancellor: those who fail and those who get out just in time. Getting out in time isn’t an option for Rachel Reeves. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are gleefully recounting how she comes up unprompted in focus groups – and not in a good way for Labour. Murmurings are growing once again that she could be replaced by crisis-sponge Pat McFadden, a reassuring, safe pair of hands who served as the Chancellor’s deputy in opposition. It won’t be just the economy’s future at stake as Reeves delivers the Spring Statement.
Walking dead Kemi Badenoch’s net-zero U-turn may, according to some Tory MPs, hasten an end to her misery rather than save the stumbling leader’s skin. One-time energy minister Chris Skidmore taunted his old colleague by republishing a speech by the then business secretary in which she extolled the economic benefits of renewable power. The party’s right doesn’t buy her conversion and the centre has decided Kemikaze is a dud. It’s nigh-on impossible to find a Conservative MP who thinks she’ll survive the year. A May local-election drubbing is widely viewed as a potential tipping point (as Rachel Cunliffe writes on page 30).
Self-styled free-speech champion Nigel Farage dodged questions from reporters at a Reform press conference at the National Liberal Club in London. His was the deafening silence of a leader rattled by the Rupert Lowe shouting match. Calling zero journalists after parading 29 mostly pre-announced council rats who’d jumped ship to Reform, then repeatedly whining “boring” with the occasional “yawn” to hacks trying to elicit details, was Farage delivering an unintentional if apposite verdict on his own non-event event. Lowe is evidently living rent-free in running-scared Farage’s head.
Rory Stewart is accused of reinventing his time in parliament on his podcast with Alastair Campbell by Tory former minister Mark Field in his autobiography The End of an Era. Field argues Stewart and sworn enemy Boris Johnson are “two peas in a pod” with far more in common than either cares to admit. “Highly competitive, egotistical, hugely self-confident and with an overdeveloped sense of their own political destiny,” writes Field, “they both appeared to believe in their innate right to lead.” Two rival self-loving Old Etonians? Never!
Which Tory former cabinet minister was berated by a neighbour for relieving himself through park railings on the way home from a night out? Minor clue: the mystery urinator is no longer an MP.
[See also: Who could succeed Kemi Badenoch?]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age