Among Tory ghosts and Labour ghouls, Rachel Reeves is a fright night all to herself

There was a murderously chill wind running through Treasury Questions ahead of Wednesday’s Budget

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the charming Paymaster General, has a beautiful baritone voice and a twitch. Nothing to be ashamed of; lots of people have them. I’m always winking at Italian waiters.
But when Nick gets angry, which he often has to pretend to do, he goes “neck twist, blink, blink” – and it’s catching. Up in the Commons gallery, I twisted and blinked in sync so hard I nearly dropped my laptop on Laura Trott. A jury would call that murder. Everybody knows I want her seat.
Tory Trott was confecting outrage at the Government having leaked its Budget. Thomas-Symonds said: you always did that in power. Laura said: well now you’ve done it, too. Whatever. I just want to know how much this nightmare is going to cost me. This Budget has got your correspondent in such a panic, I’ve taken all my money out of the bank and buried it in the garden. The dog says it’s the most sensible thing he’s seen me do.
The only other way to avoid the tax raid is to be classed as a “working person”. That’s why the Government defines it so narrowly. A working person, says Labour, is any average, normal Briton who earns thirty pence an hour and lives under a bridge.
And the party certainly represents a cross-section of regular people – if said people were at a Halloween party. Natalie Fleet, with a white streak in her hair, came as Cruella de Vil. Sam Carling, that serious young man with the large forehead, was The Mekon, hovering up and down, trying to catch the Speaker’s eye. When he succeeded, he repeated another MP’s speech verbatim, even though his own words were pre-written. The boy can read minds!
Mike Amesbury, alas, could not attend after one of his constituents accidentally fell on his fists. So the scariest MP was Rachel Reeves, wearing Joker purple, as she spoke of “growing demand for data, AI and machine learning” – along with harvesting human beings to build a new generation of Daleks. From those lips, simple Labour catchphrases become orders to slave work parties. “YOU WILL FIX THE FOUNDATIONS! AT ONCE!”
Jeremy Hunt nervously rose to ask a question. This might be “our final exchange”, he said, so let me offer a note of consensus: Well done on giving more aid to Ukraine. Reeves repaid the kindness by accusing him of “lashing out at independent institutions” and lurching “towards an ideological extreme”.
There is something very mean about the Labour front bench, as if they were made of steel (I believe the Russian word for this is “Stalin”). Never mind that some are millionaires, or dressed by millionaires – or that they’re redirecting millions away from poorer voters so that Ed Miliband can build a giant dream catcher on the South Downs. They truly think they are the definition of working people.
Asked about education, the Chancellor said, bitterly: “I went to school in the 80s and 90s and I was taught in Portakabins.” So what? So did I. The wind used to blast through my Latin classes, and it made no difference to my learning at all. I still slept like a baby.