The invitation looks appealing — an evening with Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, hosted by one of the capital’s centre-Left communications companies, flourishing as a prospect of a change of government beckons. It’s posh enough to request your “dietary requirements”. This time last year, I remember Reeves and co were figuring out how to respond to the Truss collapse and rewriting a speech over the sole available dietary requirement of a cold Domino’s pizza. Twelve months on, the shadow cabinet are suddenly the guests to have around. Courted by businesses, financiers and the socially curious urban floaters who were at the designer Thomas Heatherwick’s new HQ launch party last week, a little bit Tory (George Osborne) and a little bit Labour rock ’n’ roll (Sadiq Khan).
Measuring how power shifts is not only a matter of opinion polls. Labour has had a strong lead for a while but has not been notably glitzy for — well, let’s call it a decade and a half, unless you were into the Corbyn badges-and-sandals thing.
