Why lying Rachel Reeves must go

0:02The Telegraph

0:10The accusation is liar, liar, pants on fire. The Chancellor insists she hasn't fibbed in the budget. The PM is backing her up. But the question now is whether either of them can remain in their jobs until the next general election. Also, the Your Party conference descended into chaos. We speak to the Telegraph Mole, who explains why the comrades, having pledged unity, are fighting like rats in a sack. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Tim Stanley.

0:46Tim, turns out there was no black hole. No. What happened to it? Has the Chancellor disappeared inside her own black hole? Never to emerge again. Let's get to the bottom of what lies were told. You will recall that on November 4th, The Chancellor appeared on TV in the morning while we were eating our Cheerios to say that the world was coming to an end. Yes. The money had run out and things looked much worse than she expected. And although she didn't say it, she was pitch rolling to increase income tax and break a manifesto promise. What we now know is that on October the 31st, she was informed by the OBR that far from running out of money, she had an extra£4.2 billion to play with.

1:36In other words, she was misleading us. Yes. Now, it turns out that prior to that, she already knew that she had more money to play with than she thought, right? Yes. So from the end of October onwards, we were repeatedly told that there was a£20 billion shortfall in the public finances. But the OBR had sent a letter to the Chancellor back in August saying that that shortfall was actually more like£2.5 billion. So there's a double lie here. Yes. Because first of all, it's the nature of any black hole should it have existed. And we should caveat this by saying, folks, sorry to confuse you, do not confuse this black hole with the 22 billion black hole she claimed to have...

2:20That's in a galaxy far, far away. She claimed to have inherited from the Tories. Put that black hole to one side. We're talking about a different, now we discover, invented black hole. As of the summer, she knew there was a bit of a black hole, but it was much smaller than she was letting on. It wasn't 20 billion, it was 2.5. And by November the 4th, when she came on telly and hinted that the black hole had grown so large that she would have to raise our taxes, In fact, she had been informed that she had£4.2 billion to play with. A black hole became a tiny little mound of money and she kept it secret.

2:52Yes. So the allegation against her is pretty strong, isn't it? Let's just summarise the sort of series of lies that she's being accused of. She's lied initially in the Labour manifesto, saying that there will be no taxes on working people. She's caveated that by saying, well, we won't directly put up income tax, VAT or national insurance. then she puts up national insurance for employers which people say is passed on to workers anyway the actual figure in the labour manifesto is 8.6 billion in tax rises that then becomes 66 billion 40 in the last budget an extra 26 on wednesday she then claims that it isn't a direct tax on working people because it's not directly putting up income tax which is what she pitch rolled on November the 4th.

3:37We then say, well, hang on, if you put up the thresholds and working people are dragged into higher tax rate bands, you are taxing them more and you can't get away from the 26 billion figure. Then there's deceit around what a working person is and whether such tax rises apply to people earning above£46 ,000 a year. But then the real truth of the lie is the justification she gave for it. She suggested that she had to raise these taxes because, as you say, our economy was apparently falling off the end of a cliff, a downgrade in productivity. It's Trump's fault. It's Truss's fault. It's Brexit's fault.

4:18No, in reality, what the Chancellor was doing was preparing the country for a political decision to put up taxes. A completely unnecessary manifesto-breaking political decision. So it's very obvious that over the course of the summer, while she's repairing this budget, she was laying the ground for big tax rises. She appears on telly on November the 4th, despite having been explicitly told that those tax rises are not necessary. She hints that they're going to happen. And then it seems there was panic within the Labour Party, that the rest of the cabinet didn't like it and said, we cannot go down the path of breaking manifesto promises.

4:58And at that point, suddenly, the Chancellor discovers that the economy is not so bad after all, and briefs the BBC's Chris Mason and others that figures suggest that she has more money to play with than she thought, which has led to Chris Mason saying that he thinks the BBC C was misled by those briefings. Let's list the people who have been misled. The public, probably most importantly. The markets, Labour MPs. We've also had a claim that the Cabinet, a Cabinet minister has come forward to say we were also misled because we weren't given these figures when we were told taxes would have to rise.

5:45Ministers. I mean, the list of who she's misled is enormous. And crucially, the market. Yes. Because the market reacted very negatively to her November the 4th statement. And there is an argument for saying that if you are sharing information with the public that they're either not supposed to hear or isn't accurate. Yes. In order deliberately, for political reasons, to, I hate this phrase, we're going to keep using it, roll the pitch for what you're going to do later on. There's an argument, well, some people are saying that's borderline criminal. Yes. Which I think is a stretch. But what it probably means, at the very least, is you've broken the ministerial code.

6:24Yes. Because you have said something which is patently false and misled the rest of the cabinet. All that matters in relation to the ministerial code is whether or not the prime minister is satisfied and still has confidence in you. And this is another dimension to this which is striking, which is he is standing by her. Yes. Yes, he, Downing Street admitted... And is repeating her story and trying to convince us of it. So they, we've discussed this before, like us, they come as a pair, these two. Yes. OK, they're a double act. He had every opportunity to distance himself from her over the weekend.

6:59And yet instead, when asked, number 10 confirmed that the PM also knew about the 4.2 billion that they had stashed in the coffers and presumably conspired with her not to tell the public and anybody else about it. The PM's backing her now. Can she go the distance? I'm not sure she can. I suspect so long as she has his support, she will. And he's unlikely to give it up because the lesson of Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng is that if you lose your Chancellor, it's a vote of confidence in yourself, right? Yes. And having backed her so solidly, if her reputation nosedives anymore, how does that reflect upon him?

7:36Having said all of that, women in the past have found that when it's Takir's advantage to dump them, he will turn on them and kick them out. It could go either way. So he's only supporting her for the sake of self-preservation. Possibly. But I think the lie is one that is central to his government and his entire governing philosophy. And we know he was complicit in it. Of we're good people and we're doing this because we have to. And I think if he ever accepts that that was false, it calls into question his own leadership. When it comes to kind of criminal sanctions, so Dan Hodges at the Mail on Sunday wrote a really interesting column basically saying the Shadow Chancellor, Mel Stride, has written to the Financial Conduct Authority to say, you must investigate this.

8:22And actually, technically, if somebody in public office is found to have misled the markets in this way, there could either be an unlimited fine imposed upon them or a custodial sentence. So it's raised the specter of could the Chancellor go to jail. I wouldn't worry about that, though, because there are no cells. There's no cells left. She could just walk out as well. Would she get early release on the basis of good behaviour? Who knows? I mean, there's been quite a lot of fibbing going on. Let's not forget that this is a woman who also exaggerated her own CV and said that she was an under-14s chess champion when, in fact, she took part in that competition but came 26th.

9:00Yeah. OK, so there's some and a plagiarization claim about her own book. But so there's a kind of series of dishonesty. I'm only pointing this out because this woman and the prime minister did not hesitate in their condemnation of Boris Johnson. That's true. And his lying. Yes. And his untruths. They promised change. This was all going to change. And still we've had seemingly fib after fib after fib. so we could have the FCA investigation and then Nigel Farage is coming at it from a different angle he thinks the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner should look at her behaviour to see if it's broken the MP's code of conduct and one other thing that Dan says I think is really interesting is he gives an explanation for why all this is happening because none of it makes sense if you discovered in the pre-budget period that the economy was doing better than you thought wouldn't you tell the public and take credit for it instead she's accused of talking down the economy And Dan's argument is that what she's doing is building headroom so that she's got a war chest at the next election and she can deliver tax cuts then.

10:06In which case she would be rewarding us with our own tax money back. Yes. I suppose the other theory is she's preparing for an early election. Right. Yeah. In a bid to rescue all this, the prime minister spoke on Monday morning. I mean, having to appear publicly a few days after your budget to justify and explain your budget and insist it wasn't based upon lies is pretty remarkable. It was an effort to move things on and we'll discuss the policies that he unveiled. I mean, they're not really policies at all, but we'll discuss what he brought up. But of course, the questions dragged him back constantly to this question of the budget and whether or not it was based on lies.

10:47One was by Chris Mason, who used this turn of phrase. As a former lawyer, you'll be familiar with the concept of people offering the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Isn't the reality that in failing to be candid about the breadth of what she knew at her pre-budget news conference, the Chancellor misled us? But I thought the best question was by Robert Peston, who pointed out that in all his time he'd never seen anything so shambolic. For my sins, I've reported on budgets for 35 years. That's a good record. George, and truthfully, I have never seen preparations for a budget as shambolic as these, except for Liz Truss's mini-budget, and we all know how that ended.

11:34Is this the Chancellor's fault, or is it your fault? It's worth watching the Prime Minister when he's being asked a question he doesn't like, because he betrays himself through his body language, and he goes through several stages when he's in stress. The first is you'll notice the mouth drops open like that. Shocked to be asked a question. Not very far, but it just sort of drops open like he needs to inhale more breath. Second, he starts shuffling his papers. He's sort of looking for something, his papers. He's a lawyer. There must be an answer to it somewhere here. There's a technicality I need to find.

12:07Then he starts furiously crossing things out on the page. Is it GB News' name? We're not asking them a question. And then finally, when he comes to answer, we get the full display of sign language. And it's always chef's kiss, thumbs up and furiously pleasuring the air. Oh, God. I won't describe that for listeners, but you get the idea. I think we can imagine exactly the movement that you're doing there, Tim, if you're listening to this. Wow. I hadn't noticed the last part of that. No, that's what he does. Chef's kiss and thumbs up. Yes, yes. Oh, and I should add that the double chin becomes a triple.

12:46Yes. His back goes very straight. He tucks the chin in because he's about to stand on principle. And to do that, he almost goes on to tippy toes. He just doesn't like any journalistic scrutiny at all. He doesn't. He thinks it's unfair. If we get into the content, I mean, because... Because the man is all about his honour, right? He runs on his honour. He's not got a philosophy, really. It's unclear why he's doing what he's doing. I don't believe there is. OK, we'll come into why they've done this later on. But I don't think there is a vision for the country. It's just we're good people. We're good people.

13:21I'm a good person. I'm here today because I'm a good person. And if you're asking me why I've done this, you're questioning whether or not I'm a good person. Well, indeed. And also it's the terminology, for instance, even of today's speech. So we've entered this post-truth period and we've discussed this before a little bit like, I mean, it's not even gaslighting. It's being actively lied to and then you're expected to believe the lie and parrot it yourself for fear of being cancelled. So we had it with women can have penises and men can grow cervixes. No, they absolutely can't. What are you talking about?

13:53We had it with children can identify as cats. We've had it with Israel is perpetuating a genocide. And if you disagree with me, you're also a murderous maniac. We've had it on so many levels. And that's important that the lie is embedded in morality. Yes, indeed. If you disagree with this, you are a bad person. You are evil. Hence, when asked about the budget, he kept retreating back into, but we have abolished the two-child benefit. Yes, we have lifted 450 ,000 children out of poverty. Let's get onto that in just a moment, because figures are being cited that have actually been supplied to Labour by the usual suspects, the unions, the Resolution Foundation, which seems to be some kind of fast track into Labour government, and the Joseph Rowntree, who's been banging on about this for years and nothing seems to have changed, but I digress.

14:41It's the epitome of post-truth to have a Chancellor pretending they haven't lied when the whole country is looking at her going, well, no, you've lied. You've broken the manifesto, you've invented a black hole, and you haven't told us about a£4.2 billion surplus. And also, they will feel it in their wallet. So something else he said was that he had visited a hospital and when he told them that they were going to cut their fuel bills by£150, people clapped. He was really delighted that the nurses had clapped. OK, fine. But if those nurses are on a certain income, they're going to have lost money because of the budget.

15:19So he is robbing Peter to pay Peter. Yes. Why? Why not just not raise the taxes? Because they don't want to be accused of being nasty, cutting their vast amount of government spending. He's come out and pitch rolled a few ideas on how welfare is going to be reformed. But again, this is the truth of the lie. The welfare budget is going up by£60 billion. It's going to top£403 billion by the end of Parliament. This welfare, ladies and gentlemen, I have an alert. Forget the rebellion. Forget backbenchers bleating on and whining. Welfare spending is increasing. There is no cut. There may be some reforms, but nothing is being cut on welfare.

16:08And I bet those reforms are expensive. Well, but the point is as well, this is the other thing. Everybody's looked at the budget and has made the following perfectly correct conclusion. We are being taxed more to pay benefits to people who aren't in work. That's the bottom line. That's what the budget was. But it was never better summed up. A bricklayer called Don Daniels has gone viral because he's pictured himself on Instagram. He's standing amidst the snow with a sort of shovel in his hand. You look at the picture and think, God, he's got a day's work ahead of him. And the joke caption is, some days I want to give it up, but there's people on benefits depending on me.

16:45That is what we have become. OK. And I think the perception of that, it's never been better illustrated, actually, than by a Centre for Social Justice report that splashed the Sunday Express at the weekend, and we also carried details of it, making the calculation that a working family, two parents working with three children, would now have to earn£71 ,000 a year as a household income to compete with a similar family on benefits. Wow. Well, they can't compete, can they? This comes back to the Fraser Nelson argument that he gave to us on a previous Daily Tea when he did a documentary, spoke to a single mother who was earning 36 grand on benefits and said, I cannot earn this money in my local economy.

17:27So if you make a system where people who are out of work are better off than those in work, then the whole thing becomes inverted. Let's also bring in the poverty thing. So the prime minister today is quoting this, the Tories pulled 900 ,000 children into poverty, where's the source? I thought, what's the source of this claim? It's the TUC. Labour donors at the TUC. It's a unionist claim about wages. Well, the metric for measuring poverty, and I wrote about this in my column, is a dishonest one because it's a metric based on median earnings. So your class as being in poverty, if as a household income, it's 60 % below the median wage of this country.

18:08Consequently, socialists quite like taxing the rich more, forcing them out of the country, bringing the median wage down, because if the median wage comes down, you're automatically lifting more people out of poverty. So you can come up with claims like 450 ,000 children will be lifted out of poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap. But what they don't point out is that there is nothing that impoverishes a child more than being in a workless household. Because the cycle continues. Yes. And it's a poverty that's not just material, but also spiritual and of aspiration. This is what irritates me about some government programs for ending child poverty.

18:49They might put more money in pockets, and don't get me wrong, that's helpful. But if, for instance, you're running breakfast clubs in schools, you're not addressing the question of why a child is coming to school hungry. If, as Keir Starmer said in his speech, some kids come to schools able to read and others come still wearing nappies, you're not addressing the question of why is that child still in a nappy. No. It's an insult to the poor, by the way. If people are on low incomes, they really don't want to be told by the Prime Minister or have this sort of automatic assumption that they can't get their children to school with a Weetabix inside them, having brushed their teeth.

19:31Yes, exactly. Can we make a distinction here? Because there seems to be this labelling of anybody on low wages can't be a good parent and therefore breakfast clubs sweep in, teachers start brushing teeth, teachers start changing nappies. What has poverty got to do with potty training? Yeah, and I suspect that the government could give some parents£10 ,000 and a free holiday to Florida, and their children would still arrive at school with unbrushed teeth in a nappy. That's the bit of poverty that's really hard to break. It's the cultural and aspirational kind of poverty. And the same goes with the benefits question.

20:09I think our patience is becoming exhausted with the idea of people being trapped on welfare. as if the government forces them with a gun to their head to receive benefits. Some people choose to be trapped on welfare. And the only way you'll get it off them is by removing said welfare. And I suspect that what the government will come up with is a reform policy which involves spending more money to encourage people back to work. And that's not an unreasonable gamble because, A, he didn't come out with a policy at this speech. He just said, I'm going to ask Alan Milburn, former new Labour minister, to look into it.

20:50And yeah, OK, he's quite Blairite, but that's just like effectively a one-man commission. And secondly, they already had a welfare reform plan and they ditched it because the backbenchers didn't like it. What is going to have changed between the failure of that policy and the new one that means the backbenchers are going to support it? I suspect it'll turn out to be an even more generous handing out of benefits. We should add that there was a third element to the speech, which was the Prime Minister said we need to have a, quote, closer relationship with the EU. Oh, great. Gordon Rayner, to be fair, wrote a whole essay about this at the weekend that you can see on the Telegraph website.

21:33And we were discussing it in the newsroom. And I was like, is he trying to drag us into the EU? And Gordon said, well, I'm looking into it. And then lo and behold... It turns out he pretty much is. Because you try not to believe it. you're like, are you joking? What, on top of all of this, you're now wanting a closer alignment with a Eurozone that, by the way, is equally as screwed as we are economically, with weird leaders like Macron, you know, halfway on his way out, but somehow Keir Starmer seems to be lauding this chap as some beacon of political common sense when he's literally universally hated in his own country.

22:04But if you're failing to deregulate, if you're not cutting taxes, then what is left for you? Well, the one, obviously, but to pull is, oh, let's just go back into the EU because that way we can lower trade barriers and we'll let the private sector generate the kind of growth that the state isn't helping with at the moment. So I see the logic there. But if it's not quite an explicit manifesto breach, it's definitely a breach with Labour's moral compact with Red Wall voters at the last election, which is we accept Brexit now. Yes. And we're not going to try and do anything to reverse it. And it wouldn't surprise me if the public supported this or accepted it because they're exhausted and they're losing money.

22:42But the Labour manifesto has become like 2025's Neville Chamberlain's piece of paper. It's just a joke. It's just basically a joke document. Let's cut it into little pieces and put it inside our Christmas crackers. Yes. And tell jokes about what Labour promised. Yes. If I were a little child and the Prime Minister told me that Father Christmas was real, I wouldn't believe it. It is true. But if that man told me it was true. If we got the studio decorated. Hey, we're talking about politics' favourite Santa. Bearded, quite old, sometimes put a red hat on. Jeremy Corbyn, should we speak about him next?

23:16And your party, my party, our party, is it a party and who's leading it?

23:33here's what the your party conference was like every year around this time there is something called winter wonderland yes and it's advertised as bringing the magic of the north pole here to the uk and when people turn up it always turns out to be a muddy field covered in paint one girl in a sexy elf costume smoking a cigarette and a drunken Santa. And you always think, OK, it's bad, but what did you expect? Why did you pay£30 to go to something called Winter Wonderland in Leeds? That's right. And likewise, your party turned out to be exactly what we expected. On the first day, they denied entrance to some members because they were already members of another party.

24:15The co-founder, Zahra Sultana, then joined them in boycotting it. On the second day, she agreed to go in where they voted to have no leader. They're going to be organised by a sort of a politburo. They're going to allow people to join it who are already members of other parties, which includes that wonderful Trotskyite cult, the Socialist Workers' Party, who would take over a Tupperware party if you gave them half an inch. And the whole thing just descended into absolute pointless chaos and ended with a man singing glad to be gay while the presiding committee looked thoroughly miserable, including poor old Jeremy Corbyn.

24:52Did he verge into the Venn diagram of your party and say proud to be gay in Palestine or anything like that? Well, I think that's what a lot of this was about. It was about the difficulty of papering over the support for the party among conservative Muslims and the support among pro-trans activists. I sadly could not go, but Annabelle Denham did. What was it like? It was surreal. It was weird. It was a bit sad and it sort of veered between being quite muted and being quite mad and shambolic throughout. No coherence, no real policy. It was just people stood up and shouting really tired old lines about oppressed workers and why we all need to eat the rich.

25:37There were a few gems out there. So Jeremy Corbyn, who, well, he kept saying how full the room was, which politicians always do. Trump, perhaps most guilty among them. But actually, if you looked around you, there were quite a few empty rows. But he kept saying our party and then tripping up and saying your party and then reverting to our party and sort of oscillating between the two. And you think of all the things that he would have wanted to come out of that conference, a new name might have been one of them leading the party. You'd have thought he'd be more expert when it came to pronouns.

26:10Yes. I watched the debate on the name change. and speaker after speaker said, we don't want to have this debate. This debate is misleading. It's dragging us away from the important issues of the day, which is the witch hunt at this conference against members and against comrades. I mean, witch hunt is not a phrase you want to use in a conference that includes actual witches. No. But it did occur to me the sheer number of boys with long hair with strange names who are clearly transitioning to something. It occurred to me that if they did kick out all the conservative Muslims and they just became a party for trans, They could be their party.

26:44Yes. Because that's the right pronoun. Lots of people were saying their pronouns. I caught a little bit on X and then I had to turn away and rearrange my sock drawer for more entertainment. And there are some social media videos out there, aren't there, of these conventions of people that have to preface everything with, can I just say that these are my pronouns? And then somebody starts disrespecting the pronouns and then somebody else stands up because they're neurodiverse and they can't cope with the noise. And then the speaker loses control. It almost became a parody of itself. But this is the other post-truth period that we have entered.

27:17And this is what happens when Frankenstein meets its monster. We now have a scenario where there are some who attend the Your Party conference that don't think that, Jeremy, I've fought racism all my life, Corbyn. You have fought some racism, but not anti-Semitism, sadly. Is not anti-Zionist enough, Annabelle? That's the era that we're in now, that we've now got a group of people. These are presumably the same people who think the BBC is biased towards Israel. Oh, definitely, yes. Who don't think that Corbyn, who famously described Hamas and Hezbollah as friends, isn't anti-Israel enough. No, but that's ultimately what these people fundamentally believe, isn't it?

27:59So there was that article that was setting out all of the reasons why Jeremy Corbyn was insufficiently anti-Zionist. And let's not forget, this is somebody who got himself into all sorts of trouble as Labour leader for anti-Semitism that was running rampant through his party. But just back to sort of some of the details of being there, there were plenty of pride flags, plenty of trans flags, plenty of men, as you say, with long hair, plenty of keffiers, plenty of crocheted cardigans. But I would say all reasonably... Any Tory scum badges? No, not that I saw. Any protesters? Any anti-reform rhetoric?

28:34not that i i mean just the usual sort of farage bashing reform bashing fascist exactly fascist exactly just as you card stuff for them for the for the um but you know i did enjoy how on the eve of the conference zara sultana said that she wanted to nationalize the entire economy which is not even something yes because of stalin okay um yes might make the khmer rouge but the backdrop The top to this, of course, is that your party are now polling at just 12%. But that's really high. Well, it is, except when you look at the detail, actually that 12 % flatters. Right. Because 85 % of that 12 % would vote for the Green Party.

29:16So these are people who are open to voting for your party, but not necessarily wholly persuaded. And I suspect a lot of them will flock to the Greens. Indeed, many already have because your party is now down six percentage points since a few months ago. As a social phenomenon, do you think your party supporters are the same as Green Party supporters? Or are there some difference between them? I think if you were to do a Venn diagram, there would be a decent amount of overlap. But there are a lot of people who still vote for the Green Party because they consider themselves to be environmentalists.

29:51They're doing so because they think this is the party that will look after wildlife that cares about biodiversity. And they really ought to look perhaps a bit more closely at it. There's a lot of Green supporters that are just disgruntled Tories. And I'm not sure they're flocking to Sertana and Corbyn. No, but I suppose I should have been specific. I mean the actual party activists themselves. And I do think having attended a Green event, I'm not an expert, I think they are subtly different. they're a bit more middle class, a little bit more normal, more interested in the environment, just not quite as batty or insane.

30:24And your party, like Momentum used to do, really is sucking in the cults. Unless you know about this stuff, if you know this stuff, you recognise these people instantly. Oh, you're SWP. Oh, you're with the Socialist Alliance. And these are groups that really live in little sealed communities. Yes. I think green is a bit bigger than that. It's a bit more mainstream. So this is fringe. Yeah. This is off-Broadway socialism. That's a good way of putting it. And Greens is West End stroke Broadway big-ticket socialism. Sank Polanski has some charm. Well. Zahra Sultana has no charm. She looked utterly miserable when she was giving her speech.

31:04And she condemned the conference's behaviour in her speech to the conference. And they all talk about unity. I know. And they're at each other's throats. They couldn't be more divided. divided. Before we go, who knows what word of the year is, according to the Oxford Dictionary. It's actually two words. It's going to get me angry. What is it? It's rage bait. Do we know what rage bait means, Annabelle? I think it's us. What is it? Us putting things on the Daily Tee? I think it's the Daily Telegraph. Yeah, that's right. It's us saying that your party people are odd and strange and then getting a barrage of abuse for it.

31:37Yes. How would you define rage bait, Annabelle? I wouldn't know how to define rage bait. But this happens every single year. They tell us what the word is. Well, it isn't a word either. The word we've all been using and none of us have heard it. It's a phrase. Although, after this podcast and in general, I don't think it should be phrase of the year. I think pitch rolling should be phrase of the year. And then can we ban it? Then we acknowledge it as phrase of the year. Can we outlaw it? Right. Now, this is interesting because we were debating what pitch rolling was and where it had come from and why it suddenly become Westminster parlance.

32:10And a lovely man called John Gray from Essex got in touch. As a volunteer cricket grounds person, I would like to inform that for every cricket match played in the UK, adults and juniors, there is a significant amount of work that goes into pitch rolling, as opposed to that undertaken by Miss Reeves in recent weeks. Any cricket wicket, this is significant because the ashes are on, Tim, I don't know if you've noticed, can be produced by a lady or a man. However, each cricket wicket pitch is given individual treatment by cutting the grass down to a height where the grass is then thinned out so that the pitch can be rolled.

32:46Finning is undertaken by way of scarification and brushing. This is a physically tiring process. Any assessment is then made of whether water can be applied to the pitch before rolling. Once rolling is complete, the pitch is cut again and marked before being handed over to the teams to compete. As you can see, this is a far more skilled and complete process than has been demonstrated by the Chancellor, her advisers and the Treasury. I would therefore caution against using the term pitch rolling. What John is saying here is we do this very carefully, whereas what the Chancellor does is just take some advice from the OBR, bury it, mention some things, not mention others, come up with cheerio speeches suggesting there will be tax cuts, then there aren't.

33:26It's all a sham compared to the very careful work that takes place in Essex and at cricket grounds around the country. Yes, it's closer to the way I cut a lawn, which is to pay someone else to do it. Finally, it's the 1st of December. The studio is decorated and we have a present. Oh, we have a present to open. Should I do card? You do wrapping. OK, OK, you do the card. By the way, I've got the bad end of that deal. Should I do that thing with the card where I see if there's any money in it? Oh, dear Daily Tea, I love watching Tim and Camilla, but I often wonder, doesn't that teapot get cold? I've paid you a tea cosy so that the tea you drink can stay as hot as the tea you spill.

34:08Steeped in admiration, Eileen Whelan? Eileen Whelan. Yes, I know Eileen. Hello, Eileen. It's lovely to hear from you. It's just an unusual first name, Eileen. Yeah, she's a very good friend of mine. She lives in New York, I think. So this has come all the way from the United States of America. This is glorious. And I can tell you she will have made this by hand. This is extraordinary. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? For those listening, it is a yellow tea cosy with the telegraph emblem on the front in a triangle. It has been embroidered in black so beautifully. It's so accurate. And then the material for the tea cosy is newspaper print.

34:45This, oh, look, there's another telegraph stamp. This is a wonderful piece of sewing. I'm putting it on now. It's a bit late now. Apologies. But look at that bad boy. and it fits the big yellow teapot perfectly. Eileen is a wonderful craftswoman. She once knitted for me a matching hat and jumper set for my dog. So he wears the jumper and I wear the hat. And I can tell you, I wear it. Do you know what I would like? Because I know you took some offence at my critique of your tank top last week. Eileen, if you have time, could you knit me a little hers to his tank top, please? No, don't. And then I promise the next time we have an outside broadcast, I promise to wear it.

35:30We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.