Rachel Reeves’s spending review, setting out budgets for government departments, was peppered with references to her backbench colleagues, as she thanked her “honourable friends” from one constituency after another for making the case for more investment in their area, and announced that she was happy to oblige.
This is a trend that has grown in recent years. The great proponent of it was George Osborne, who used Budgets and other set-piece speeches to assert the Treasury’s power and to build his network of supporters in the party. He copied it from Gordon Brown, who used the Treasury as a base from which to campaign for the succession.
