Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm

Oscar Robinson. I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and Michael Simmons. Now, Robert Jenrick, the newly

minted reform shadow chancellor, made his first speech this morning where he had the chance to show

what kind of chancellor he would be.

He had plenty of soothing words to say to calm the jitters of the bond markets.

Now, Tim, the big newsline seem to be that he's backing the OBR and the Bank of England.

Now, this is a break from what Nigel Farage has said previously.

Were you as surprised as I was?

I mean, not ultimately, because Farage and Genric want to look like a government in waiting.

And I know Generic's sort of driving goal as in this new job, which he's been thinking about for quite a while. I mean, I think he and Farage discussed the possibility of him taking this on before Christmas.

And he certainly knew when he crossed over from the Tory party that this was the role he was going to take.

So I think he's been doing a lot of thinking about how you carve out a distinctive position,

but also don't leave the Tories in place where they can say, look at the Labour Party, look at reform.

They're both incontinent in their spending and rash in the way they want to go about running the economy.

And so his approach seems to be that, you know, you keep Bank of England independence

whilst kicking the WhatsApp out of it for mucking up on inflation.

And you keep the OBR, but point out that it's been a total failure

in terms of all of its predictions and that the models they use are not necessarily conducive

to good running of a government. And Generic's argument will be that, you know, they're pretty

bad at scoring the benefits of tax cuts and all the rest of it, and that they

should rethink how they go about things. So while Farage has sort of talked in general about

scrapping the ABR and has muttered sort of tangentially about removing the independence of the

...