PopCon's Swift takes the new Chancellor to task for her statement about the public finances...

Well, that didn’t take long did it? From honeymoon period to conscious uncoupling from the electorate in a few weeks. It’s going to be a tough Autumn for Sir Keir and his shouty sidekick, the fury of finance, Rachel Reeves.

Let Swift be balanced here. Although a great deal of Reeves’s revelations of Tory misdemeanours was spurious, the outgoing administration did not have clean hands. Future spending plans were as fanciful as an airborne castle. There were indeed probably one or two skeletons rattling in departmental cupboard.

In retrospect, however, Reeves did herself no favours by the manner of her statement. Cold fury is like sincerity - if you can fake that you can fake anything. She couldn’t. It was like a dodgy Lady Macbeth in the first audition at RADA - next please! - all too obviously confected.

We know that because, let’s face it, the shock horror £22bn ‘hole in the public finances’ is really a paltry amount considering the totality of government expenditure - less than 2% of the whole, as our esteemed leader, Mark Littlewood, was quick to point out. Moreover, Reeves knew it weeks ago.

But let’s be fair, prudent management would not have allowed that to happen. Unfortunately for Ranting Reeves, quite a lot of that was the cost of meeting public sector pay settlements which are advisory and not binding on the government.

Swift suspects that the Tories would not have been so generous, or if they were, productivity gains would have been required. The very handsome package for junior doctors - 22% or thereabouts - will have the effect of encouraging other groups, inside and outside the NHS, to ask for more. 

It won’t even be effective in shutting the doctors up: even if they vote for it, their leaders are channeling Oliver Twist, with ‘more please’ already demanded for next year.

You can’t buy these people off. Like the proverbial Danes, they’ll be back.

So far, so politics. We all knew Labour would put taxes up: it’s atavistic. Like Valmont in Les Liasons Dangereuses, it’s beyond their control. They will be bad taxes too - far from the low but broad-based taxes on the Laffer model, they will be narrowly focused, damaging, and evaded.

What caused Swift to gag on his port, however, was none of the above. Depressingly predictable, after all. It was the liberal use of the word ‘liar’ directed by Reeves at the courteous and generally mild-mannered Jeremy Hunt. 

It was not necessary.

It was doubtlessly driven by a need to squash those voices pointing out that Reeves herself was something of a stranger to the truth.

It was cheap and nasty and should have been withdrawn. It was not.

We saw something of the real face behind the oh-so-reasonable mask of the government, and we should remember it.