The faster than expected fall in inflation this morning is timely for the Government, given positive headlines for Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves both before and after she delivered the Mais Lecture at the Bayes Business School last night. Delivered annually since 1978, it tends to be most politically significant ahead of a big change election: by Tony Blair in 1995, George Osborne in 2010 and last night when the audience heard from the woman likely to be the next Chancellor. Reeves was the second woman to deliver the lecture after her predecessor Anneliese Dodds in 2021.

The lecture was more broad brushstrokes than fine detail, with growth and the reform of public services Reeves’ answer to avoid what she called ‘almost impossible trade offs’ between tax and spend. She expanded on her previous thinking on ‘Securonomics’, a ‘smart and strategic state’ providing economic security to businesses and working people who can then ‘stand and fall on their own merits, not on the basis of events far beyond their control’. Reeves sees Securonomics as the answer to an unstable, insecure world of disrupted supply chains, economic imbalances, political populism, and a difficult energy transition. But also as the alternative to ‘stumbling blindfolded into an era of a bigger state, the unavoidable corollary of sticking plaster politics.’

There were also some new policies. Reeves committed to borrowing only for investment, to following Jeremy Hunt’s pledge to get debt falling as a share of GDP, and recommitted to a ‘modern industrial strategy’, boosting the Treasury’s Enterprise and Growth Unit, and reversing Hunt’s downgrading of climate change in the remit for Bank of England. She also had a pop at Gordon Brown for under-regulation of the banks in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Few voters notice these events which is why Labour have been working hard to trail the speech. Most spectacularly with a Daily Telegraph splash yesterday comparing Reeves to Margaret Thatcher. Why? Because Labour want to capitalise on Tory in-fighting and land the message that Labour stands for stability. In the wake of Hunt’s rather vanilla budget, and as confidence in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wains, the speech came at an opportune time for the Shadow Chancellor.

Labour’s election strategy is aimed at appealing to floating voters, but also to persuade disillusioned Conservatives that they are safe to stay at home: to reassure that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are very much not Jeremy Corbyn. Secondly Labour wants to continue to woo the City and generate confidence that economic reform and stability will return under Labour. All parties are desperate to escape the doom loop of low growth and those ‘impossible trade offs’ between tax and spend.

The Thatcher analogies are perhaps overdone, but Reeves may well be ready.

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