Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves was left red-faced live on Sky News as host Trevor Phillips played her own words back to her.
One BBC star has predicted that Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves has “ended her career” on live TV after her own words from 12 months ago were parroted back at her on Sky News. She sat down with host Trevor Phillips to discuss the recently released Autumn Budget, when Trevor said: “Let’s remind ourselves of what you said to me 12 months ago…”
A clip was played from 2024, with Reeves saying: “We’ve now wiped the slate clean, under the mismanagement and the chaos of the previous government. It’s now on us. We’ve put everything out into the open, we’ve set the spending envelope on the course for this Parliament, we don’t need to come back for more. We’ve done that now, we’ve wiped the slate clean.
“I’m not going to be able to write five years’ worth of Budgets on this show today, there’s no need to come back with another Budget like this, we will never need to do that again. We’ve now set the spending envelope for the remainder of this Parliament, we don’t need to increase taxes further.
“We need to do two things now – we need to reform our public services to make sure they work better, and we need to grow our economy.”
Not holding back, Phillips said: “That wasn’t true, was it?”
A stuttering Reeves tried to argue: “Well the Budget this year was not on the scale of the one last year, but as I set out in my speech at the beginning of November, the context for this Budget did change. I did have to ask people to contribute more.
“The biggest thing that happened between the spring forecast and the forecast that the Office of Budget Responsibility provided for this Budget was a big downgrade in productivity.”
Despite insisting Labour had “wiped the slate clean” last year, she went on to blame the Tories, stating: “The OBR have been really clear, that reflects the legacy of the previous 14 years, not anything that this government has done in the last 16 months, but nevertheless that productivity downgrade means that they’ve forecast tax receipts are going to be £16billion lower – which is why I gave a speech saying that the OBR downgrade has had a big impact on public finances.”
Rachel Reeves had her own words played back to her (Image: Sky News)
BBC Radio and GB News commentator Lee Harris took to social media to pinpoint the moment Reeves “ran out of road”, tweeting: “This is astonishing. Sky News plays Rachel Reeves’ own words back to her, she then proceeds to tell even more lies and dig herself an even bigger ‘black hole’.
“There is no way she can survive this. The Chancellor has finally run out of road, and it’s ended in a HUGE car crash.”
Another viewer said: “That is the thing, why not just tell the truth or say you were mistaken or whatever and it nips it in the bud so to speak – what is it about so many politicians that they have an inability to do so – it seems like they suffer from mythomania – an obvious worldwide phenomenon!”
Somebody else said: “She’s not asking me to contribute more, she’s forcing me to pay more. Because if she asked I’d tell her to get lost!”
