Nothing best represents my out of touch nature than when I was told the location of Andrew Griffith’s first speech as Shadow Chancellor. “North London” the email said. Where on Earth could that be? Perhaps King’s Cross? Maybe, at a push, Hampstead?
But alas, no. North London in this context meant Tottenham. Crikey. I’d never been to Tottenham before. Would I need a tetanus shot? Would I be changing timezones? Who knew. When I finally made it to the faraway north, left Seven Sisters Tube station and headed up the road, I bumped into a fellow SW1er who – stood outside a kebab shop – merely remarked “lovely place, isn’t it?” Quite.
Griffith chose Tottenham’s Capital City College campus as the place for his first big gig. Flanked by a boiler, he opened by saying that it was “a technical college producing the next generation of plumbers, construction workers, hairdressers and many more” “typical of the millions of small businesses and self-employed” across the country. Brill. Our new Shadow Chancellor understands symbolism. Hand him the keys to Number 11, he’s ready.
He went on the usual spiel. Burdensome regulation is bad, Healey should rule out tax rises in the Autumn Budget, et cetera et cetera. It wasn’t anything special, though later in the speech he set out some worthwhile ideas. The next Tory government, he announced, would scrap IR35 – a set of rules which me and the hacks either side of me quickly looked up on our phones, having never heard of them before.
From what I can gather, they’re designed to prevent contractors from acting as ‘disguised employees’ to pay less tax. Binning it would massively boost contractor take-home pay whilst at the same time making hiring flexible employees far easier. That sounds good to me.
He also announced that Robert Colville – the former Director of the Centre for Policy Studies – and Lord Craig Mackinlay would be taking up advisory roles focused on slashing red tape and taxes. Again, pretty decent stuff. Can’t complain.
But aside from that, there wasn’t much. The speech lacked oomph. Not in a bad way. More in a I’d-rather-not-say-anything-outlandish-that-could-get-me-fired-in-my-first-few-weeks sort of way. When asked in the Q&A about how the party intends to bring younger people on side despite hinting at abolishing inheritance tax and pledging to keep the triple lock, Griffith simply said that the Tories were committed to cutting tax for everybody – not just a select few. The students at the back of the room didn’t seem convinced.
He also refused to rule out lifting income tax bands, and he didn’t answer whether the Tories would appoint a trade union boss to the Bank of England’s Court of Directors. It was an artful display of a media trained politician at his best, spewing all manner of buzzwords without ever actually answering the question.
The reaction to the speech from the audience was varied. Some lapped it up, saying that they “liked it a lot” “driving the right things.” Others, however, felt a tad let down. It was “a bit flat”, one of the students remarked to me.
But whilst many may be quick to chuck around criticisms such as ‘bland’ or ‘vanilla’, very few, I suspect, will use the phrase ‘wrong’. Because what he said was correct. He was right in his diagnosis, that businesses were suffering at the hands of a government that simply didn’t understand them. He was right that the welfare bill needed to be reined in, and he was right that punitive legislation must be scrapped.
He wasn’t at all flashy. He played it safe and, for a Chancellor in waiting, that is perhaps the most important thing. No matter what the likes of GB News might say – “he’s not a dynamic public speaker” – he offered a sense of reassurance. No one wants the bookkeeper to be some erratic, haphazard personality. They want them to be a little dull and sensible, to the point that they can be trusted.
Many will be quick to argue that this is what plagued Mel Stride. The former Shadow Chancellor seemed cursed with the inability to cut through to the general public. To the few that recognised him, he was just that bloke that followed Kemi Badenoch around and talked about money. People in focus groups hadn’t even heard of him, to the extent that they thought he was a woman – ‘who’s she?’, as the famous rumour goes.
Griffith may well fall into the same trap, and yet we assume that this is a bad thing when it mightn’t be. Does anyone actually know who the Shadow Chancellor is outside of an election? Will he be forced to begin every interview with ‘Oh, well, I am just de Shadow Chancellor’ to lay claim to the title? Two thirds of the public don’t know much about the Chancellor, let alone his shadow counterpart for Christ’s sake. Obscurity really isn’t a Shadow Chancellor’s hamartia.
I think that, and please bear with me here, the best way to sum up Griffith’s first speech in the job would be to compare it to when your mum cooked you a cottage pie when you got home from school. It wasn’t amazing. You weren’t thrilled at the prospect. You weren’t bouncing off the walls, eager to wolf down the concoction of beef and potatoes. But you weren’t dismissive of it either. You didn’t hate it. It did the job. It was just a bit eh.