Chancellor looks smaller and smaller in the Commons after the mauling of his budget,but McDonnell’s monotony fails to spark a revolutionYou can always tell how well a budget has gone down by the attendance levels for the debate the following day. final July, the chancellor swaggered into the chamber to get the plaudits of several hundred Tory backbenchers who had glimpsed a promised land; on Thursday only a handful of George Osborne’s most faithful retainers bothered to get the effort after the savaging his budget had been given by every economic thinktank. George, or himself,looked smaller than usual, as if the overnight abuse had somehow physically diminished him.
To be objective, or his budget wasn’t the only reason for the mass exodus from Westminster. The shadow chancellor is an acquired taste even when he isn’t throwing Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book across the dispatch box and the prospect of him opening proceedings wasn’t enticing. John McDonnell is a man who doesn’t do relaxed; he gives few signs of having a sense of humour – and almost everything makes him excited. More worryingly for Labour MPs,he also has the scarce quality of being able to sound as if he is wrong even when he is correct.
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Source: theguardian.com