Rachel Reeves was a wan prophet of perdition, honking like a faulty cyborg: QUENTIN LETTS

Few of us are at our best before breakfast, but Rachel Reeves’ early morning speech was a horror show.

This unusual event was apparently intended to ‘set context’ for his upcoming Budget. He would speak directly to breakfast television viewers. More accustomed to celebrity trivia and consumer news, you dread to imagine what they make of the prophet of doom honking at them like a malfunctioning cyborg.

Grim wasn’t exactly the right word. He sowed destruction. Optimism was almost completely absent. Lady Tribulation was here, coming to stir the cauldron of disaster, but she was also terrified. Only a very attentive viewer will not wonder: ‘Is he sick? Didn’t he sleep? Should he take a break?’

A yellowish, unsmiling being glowed below the cathode ray tube. His pupils were stuck to the top of his sockets. His fringes were well shaved. He licked his teeth, pursed his lips, and after a minute started talking about the ‘supply side of the economy’ and the ‘productivity conundrum’. The audience asked ‘can’t we get back to Richard with the showbiz gossip?’ he might have wondered.

I’m not enough of a fashion analyst to tell you whether his plum jacket and faded shirt had a whitening effect on his face. How pale he looked. Almost mummified. The skull appeared elongated in the shape of a coffin. Debt, despair, doom. Next up, folks: Higher taxes. Whoever styled the hairstyle may have had Herman Munster in mind.

The economy was in terrible shape. We understand this. Voters may also have realized that the situation is worse than when Labor took office last year. Ms. Reeves insisted it was others’ fault. Brexit, George Osborne, Liz Truss, Donald Trump, V. Putin, forecasters. Everyone else. Everyone except himself and Sir Keir Starmer.

If you’re going to play such a game, it’s probably better to do it in a conversational, tactful way, perhaps sitting at a table with soft lighting. This is how Harold Wilson used to do it. He would express this in everyday terms. He’d say something like, ‘Now look, we all know things are a little rough, but we’ll be okay because Uncle Harold knows what he’s doing.’

Ms. Reeves is incapable of such rapport. Instead, he stood upright in front of the garish lighting, gulping and spluttering, eyes turned to the ceiling, babbling staccato. The Downing Street media room, flanked by Union Jacks, was shouting ‘EMERGENCY’.

‘This is not about re-litigating old elections,’ he insisted. I’m sorry, it was exactly like that. He tried leaning on the podium but soon gave up, it was a bad idea. When he briefly mentioned ‘the brightness of the future’, he smiled as if he were sick with nausea. The BBC’s Chris Mason asked him about his ill-fated personal property deals. His right eye began to move of its own accord. That eye seemed to be heading towards the door. So who can blame this?

After this defensive, despairing speech (a lemon-squirted oyster performance) we reporters flocked to the Royal Academy of Engineering, where the energetic Kemi Badenoch was also giving a talk about economics.

He talked about tax cuts, public spending cuts, job creation and the madness of 5,000 people a day leaving work for sickness benefits. Ms Badenoch described the Chancellor’s speech as ‘one long pancake bomb’.

He felt that Ms. Reeves had ‘given up trying’.

Being in opposition is much easier than being in government, as Labor proved in the last parliament. Still, Ms. Badenoch’s newfound confidence was striking. “We adults have a duty to behave this way,” he grumbled.

He also expressed the outdated belief that ‘effort and work should lead to reward’.

The Conservatives are doing as poorly as Labor in opinion polls, but the difference between Ms Badenoch’s smoky coolness and Ms Reeves’s bruised, glowing defeatism could not be starker.