This Scrooge-like epiphany on growth is unconvincing

There hasn’t been a change of tone like it since the freezing bookkeepers in The Muppet Christmas Carol asked Michael Caine’s Ebenezer Scrooge if they could have some more coal for their fire.

- JOHN RENTOUL

When he asks, “How would they like to be suddenly unemployed?” they start singing “Heatwave!” in hastily donned beach gear.

In such a similar fashion, Rachel Reeves switched from the gloom of painful choices needed to fill the £22bn black hole to the sunny optimism of a chancellor announcing that good times are just around the corner.

In an interview yesterday, preparing the way for a speech on growth on Wednesday, she said: “We are absolutely fantastic as a country.” She said that Britain could learn from Donald Trump’s unrelentingly pro-USA attitude: “Yes, I think we do need more positivity.”

Reeves has gone from being accused of talking the country down to sounding as if gripped by starry-eyed fantasy. She said she had been “in sales mode” this week in Davos and that we “shouldn’t apologise” for Britain’s strengths in artificial intelligence, tech and clean energy: “We shouldn’t be all polite about it. We should be shouting from the rooftops.”

Who can say whether this is a planned change to the next phase of her programme for government or a panicked response to business leaders who have told her that she has overdone the talk about the “worst fiscal inheritance since the war”? It is probably a bit of both. She had to drive home the message that the Tories had left the public finances in a mess, forcing her to make decisions that she hadn’t wanted. But her sternness put a dampener on the “animal spirits” that she now says she wants to see unleashed.