BY JOHN ISMAEL
The spectacle of a Chancellor in tears is never edifying, but in the case of Rachel Reeves, it was something worse—it was revealing. Here was a woman entrusted with the stewardship of the nation’s finances, buckling under the ordinary pressures of political life, her distress paraded before the cameras like a public confession of inadequacy.
She claimed, of course, that it was a ‘personal matter,’ as though the affairs of state should pause for the sorrows of ministers. But the public is not so easily deceived. The truth is that Reeves, like so many in this government, has been promoted beyond her capacity. The markets, those pitiless arbiters of competence, responded as they always do to weakness—the pound shuddered, borrowing costs twitched upwards. The reaction was not sentimental. It was arithmetic.
The facts of Labour’s first year in office speak for themselves. They have been beyond appalling and the sooner they sling their hook the better it will be for everybody.
There was something grimly comic about the staged solidarity that followed—Starmer and Streeting flanking her at an NHS event, their embraces as calculated as a party manifesto. One could almost hear the unspoken directive: Look, she is strong. Look, she is capable. But strength is not demonstrated in rehearsed displays of unity. It is measured in actions, in decisions, in the ability to face down crises without dissolving into tears.
Reeves speaks of ‘cracking on with the job,’ but the job is already cracking her. The welfare reforms, those great fiscal hopes, have collapsed under the weight of Labour’s own contradictions, leaving a £5bn hole in her calculations. The backbenches grow restless. The bond markets grow wary. And at the centre of it all stands Reeves, blinking under the lights, insisting that all is well even as the foundations shift beneath her.
Starmer, ever the liar lawyer, sidesteps the question of her fragility with practised vagueness. He did not notice her distress, he says, because Prime Minister’s Questions is ‘bang, bang, bang.’ A curious defence. One might have thought that a leader would notice if his Chancellor—his chief economic strategist—was falling apart beside him. But then, perhaps he has grown accustomed to her brittleness.
The Conservatives, never ones to miss an open wound, have been predictably brutal. ‘Toast,’ they call her. And why not? In any other profession, a public breakdown of this sort would be fatal. But politics, that strange world where failure is so often rewarded with promotion, may yet spare her.
The British people, however, are not so forgiving. They do not care about the personal troubles of ministers. They care about competence, about steadiness, about a government that does not fold at the first sign of difficulty. Rachel Reeves has shown herself to be lacking in all three.
If she cannot bear the weight of the Chancellorship, she should step aside. If she will not, then Starmer must ask himself how long he can afford to carry dead weight. The country’s finances are too fragile for fragility.
John Ismael is a bond trader by day and an occasional writer by night. A Dad of five, John lives in South West London with his wife Ruth. John was educated at Cambridge and, in an earlier incarnation, the corridors of Whitehall.