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There was a time when you knew where you were with a press conference. You would go along on the assumption that the person or organisation who had called it had something important to say. Something that might approximate to news.
But we live in ever more confusing days. So now we’ve reached the point where Kemi Badenoch and Mel Stride will do almost anything for attention. Where a press conference is just another excuse for a therapy session where they can unload their familiar grievances on to journalists. It’s the only way they can get anyone to listen.
Mind you, a Kemi press conference – even a meta one – is never without its entertainment value. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Tuesday’s invitation to Conservative campaign headquarters in Westminster was devised purely for the benefit of sketch writers. Or maybe it was one of the Tory party’s better April fool gags. In either case, a big thank you.
“The cost of living has become unbearable,” Kemi began. The inference was that everything had been tickety-boo up until the election last year. Back in the halcyon days of the Tory government, everyone was awash with money. Or maybe not. Badenoch did not seem in any hurry to examine her party’s legacy. The past is a foreign country.
Then to the details. Such as they were. Labour’s increase in national insurance contributions for businesses – “Labour’s job tax” – was going to make every family £3,500 worse off.
Stride would be telling us how this figure was arrived at later, she added. At which point you knew the £3.5k was entirely fictitious. Something that an intern had come up with on the back of an envelope. Mel is a decent man, but he can barely operate a contactless debit card. Quite how he’s ended up as shadow chancellor is a mystery to him as well as us.
Kemi hadn’t quite finished though. She raced through all the price increases coming into effect on Tuesday. Council tax. Water bills. TV licences. As if these were increases that would never have happened under a Tory government. As if these had come as a surprise. She also forgot to elaborate on how she would pay for Labour’s NI increase that she would presumably reverse. We were only left to assume this was the plan. She never spelled it out.
The closest we got to a cost analysis was a mumbled reference to cutting the welfare bill. Unlikely. There was outrage at Labour cutting the bill by £5bn. Cutting by £20bn would cause untold hardship. And remember the Tories’ outrage when Labour went for the low hanging fruit of the winter fuel allowance.
Come the end, Kemi seemed to be engaged in a battle with the teleprompter. Speaking quicker and quicker to see if she could get ahead of it. You couldn’t blame her. Even she seemed to be wondering what on earth she was doing here. How had she allowed herself to be talked into this?
Her heart just wasn’t in it. There was no glory in telling people stuff they either don’t believe or already know. Especially when no one was listening. She’d have been much happier talking about her latest Elon Musk X conspiracy theory that Adolescence was based on a true story and the writers had switched the race of the boy.
Then it was over to a rather desperate looking Mel, who sounded hopelessly confused as he tried to explain the origins of the fantasy £3.5k. If you took some numbers from the Office for Budget Responsibility and then made a whole load of bogus assumptions on the basis that the economy continued to tank for the next five years then you arrived at about £1.5k. And if you then doubled that, for the sake of convenience, and then rounded up your final figure by £500 you were just about there. Would that do?, he asked.
The Melster was no more forthcoming than Kemi on how he would have raised money to fill the black hole and pay for the NHS. “We would have taken a different approach,” he said carefully. A bead of sweat forming on his brow. What would he have done differently? Things. He would have done things differently. Thing things.
Why did people want to know this stuff? He proudly showed us his party’s new economic policies. A blank page. You could imagine what you wanted to see. It works for Mel. He is genuinely proud of having no policies. It makes him feel better about himself.
Predictably, no one from the media had any questions to ask about the £3.5k or the cost of living. All anyone wanted to know about was the US. Here we were in for a surprise. Because Kemi was a model of diplomacy. She didn’t want to stir up abortion wars in the UK. Nor did she want to promote a trade war. In short, she was supportive of what Keir Starmer was doing. The handful of Tories in the press conference looked amazed.
There was just time for one more contribution from Stride. Or Shaman Mel. Rachel Reeves was talking down the animal spirits. No one knew what he was talking about. Kemi appeared astonished. She was just beginning to ask herself what on earth she had been thinking when she appointed him chancellor. There again, she hadn’t had that many people to choose from.
Not that everything was that hunky dory over in Labour land. Jonathan Reynolds and Angela Rayner had both been sent out on to the airwaves to try to persuade people that they had given everyone a massive pay rise.
Try not to be negative. Stop talking down the country by talking about the contraction of the jobs market from the NI increase. Forget about your bills going up faster than inflation. Just focus on the minimum wage. And when you’re feeling better off, go and spend £17.50 at the Labour party shop on some leaflets boasting how many illegals have been deported. Labour. The new nasty party.
It made you think. What if our politicians really aren’t that incompetent? What if they are the brightest and the best the country has to offer? How bad must things be then? Time to run for the hills.
