Some things in life you just don’t see coming. Like a lottery win. Like Spurs winning a European trophy. You can now add to those two: Mel Stride getting a full house for one of his speeches. Not even standing room was available.
This just doesn’t happen to Mel. Normally you can book him a broom cupboard and there will still be plenty of space. His reputation for never saying anything of interest precedes him. Just not today. Maybe it was a slow news day. Maybe the refreshments on offer at the Royal Society of Arts were top dollar.
Mel has a kind face. But no obvious talent or skillset. He is the shadow chancellor only because someone has to be. There are 120 Conservative MPs and almost all are either halfwits or certifiable or both. Plus the Tories have already tried Jeremy Hunt. Imagine coming second to Jezza in a two-horse race. Jezza only got the job as chancellor because he looked vaguely plausible. Someone who would fit in at the Bank of England. He knew less about the economy than I did. Just think: if you had been elected as a Tory MP in 2024, you could well be shadow chancellor now.
But back to the Melster. He has the air of a rural bank manager who has been moved sideways to a branch scheduled for closure. Someone who has made a career out of saying no to nearly every mortgage proposal that crosses his desk, because that way he can never be accused of having made a risky investment. A cautious man who instinctively understands he is out of his depth in a puddle and who longs for a retirement out on the golf course.
For reasons best known to himself, Mel chose Thursday to give his first keynote speech as shadow chancellor. Curiously, he decided to make the total failure of the Tory party his subject matter. Though whether that was wholly intentional is another matter. You never can be too sure with the Melster. He’s not as bright as he looks. And he doesn’t look very bright.
He began with the analysis that the economy had largely stagnated for the last 17 years. Though he didn’t seem to have realised that his party had been in government for 14 of those. Everything was a bit of a mystery.
However he did own up to the mini-budget of 2022 being a bit of a mistake. Not that he could bring himself to say the words “Liz” and “Truss”. That might make it a bit too real. But baby steps and all that. This was the first time that a Tory politician had apologised in public for increasing everyone’s mortgages, so credit where credit was due.
The Tory party was in a bit of a pickle, he confided. Things hadn’t gone quite as well as he had hoped. The average age of a Conservative voter was now 63, so his first announcement was to insist that though it had been wrong for Labour to U-turn on the winter fuel allowance it was also the right thing to do. On the two-child benefit cap, he was all for it. If a child had made the mistake of being born to hard-up parents it was right that it should be starved to death. Better that than a lifetime of scrounging. Pour encourager les autres.
“Bats must be put up at Claridge’s,” the Melster continued, “and provided with butlers.” People in the audience began to look anxiously at one another. Was he OK? No one had anticipated Stride might be the master of the surreal. Perhaps he had decided that the only way he could get through his speech was with the assistance of psychedelics.
Having concluded that the Tories, Reform and Labour were all rubbish and out of ideas he launched into a final paean to the UK. We were the country of Austen and punk rock. I’m so pretty, oh so pretty, I’m vacant.
Then came a brief Q&A with Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England and current chief executive of the RSA. Andy and Mel are clearly old muckers and Andy had decided that his questions would be a lot more interesting than those of the assembled media. So let’s start out with a quickfire round. Love your suit, Mel. Where did you get it from? Where are you going on holiday this summer? And what would you do differently?
We would do everything the same but differently, the Melster declared. A world of cautious radicalism where taxes would be cut but not in the way that She Who Must Not Be Named had done. Andy nodded. That all made complete sense to him. Bring it on. Let the good times roll on again. Reluctantly he let a few journalists have a go instead.
The Mystic Melster allowed himself to indulge his fantasies. He yearned for a return to the 80s. The era in which he had grown up. When almost no one except him went to university. When he had no debt. When Maggie Thatcher and Richard Branson sailed up the Thames together with the sunlight playing on the water in an endless summer of opportunity. Other versions of the 1980s are available.
As for Kemi? Who was Kemi? Oh yes, that Kemi. Kemi was absolutely terrific. In her quirky little way. Of course she didn’t have any real ideas, spent far too much time on social media and was generally hopeless at prime minister’s questions. But given time, she might improve a little bit. She could always hope. At this point, you began to wonder if Mel had delusions of grandeur and fancied a pop at the Tory leadership himself. Vote Mel. Less insane than all the others. It might even work.
Come the end, even the usually irrepressibly cheerful Andy was looking a bit downcast at the way the last hour had gone. Could Mel just rewind a little and say something vaguely optimistic about the Tories? There must be some sunny uplands somewhere. Surely? The Melster looked confused. We needed a new age of thoughtfulness, he concluded. So that ruled him and the Conservatives out. Meanwhile on social media, Liz Truss was tweeting that she wouldn’t rest till she had bankrupted the country a second time. The battle for irrelevance was far from over.
