They seek her here, they seek her there, they seek the Chancellor everywhere. Where is she?
Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves is getting increasingly hard to spot (Image: Getty)
Is she in China? No, and that’s the thing. Keir Starmer flew to Beijing on a mission to drum up business for British industry, and by rights Rachel Reeves should have gone with him. She thought so too. Like the PM, she’s a renowned fan of free trips. But this time she didn’t get an invite and was left “spitting feathers”. She saw it as a snub, and a sign the PM is sharpening his knife.
This isn’t the only way Reeves has been sliding from public view. Normally she’s everywhere: hiking taxes, destroying jobs, crushing businesses, closing pubs, killing growth and confusing the public with weird breakfast press conferences. She calls it “restoring stability” and “fixing the foundations”. Apparently we’re meant to want more of it. But suddenly we’re not getting it. Rachel Reeves has gone quiet.
Junior Treasury minister Lucy Rigby blagged the China jolly. That’s not the first time Starmer has let someone else muscle in on the Chancellor’s turf. Last September, Reeves was branded “Chancellor in name only”, with the PM building his own economic unit in Number 10 to contain the chaos spilling out of Number 11.
Former Bank of England deputy governor Minouche Shafik, former Treasury official Daniel York-Smith and ex-Treasury minister Darren Jones were all deployed to keep an eye on Reeves ahead of last November’s Budget. It still wasn’t enough. She blew it anyway.
The Budget is meant to be the Chancellor’s big showpiece. Last year, Starmer didn’t even trust Reeves to write it. That job fell to notoriously potty-mouthed tax addict Treasury secretary Torsten Bell. Reeves just had to excise the swear words, deliver it without falling over, and claim the glory. Except there was no glory.
Her Budget was one of the most chaotic in history, and even Starmer couldn’t ignore the fallout. Since then he’s spent his time reversing Reeves’s earlier decisions and blocking new ones.
Starmer has demanded U-turns on Reeves’s crazy decision to axe winter fuel payments, as well as her attempts to shave £5billion off welfare, slap inheritance tax on family farms and murder the nation’s pubs with huge business rate hikes.
Last week Starmer forced through a £250 cap on leaseholder ground rents, ignoring objections from Reeves, who feared the impact on pension funds.
She’s now trying to push young people to repay student loans earlier, triggering a brutal attack from Martin Lewis. In a fight between Reeves and the nation’s favourite money saving expert, there’s only one winner.
To be fair, Reeves has been spotted out once. She popped up in Gorton and Denton ahead of this month’s by-election. Labour is said to have written the seat off. Sending Reeves rather confirms it.
Meanwhile Labour is in a frenzy over who might replace Starmer. Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband are all over this. Where’s Rachel Reeves? Nowhere to be seen.
Apparently, she feels hard done by. As the UK’s first woman Chancellor, who has the trust of the bond markets if nothing else, she thinks she deserves better. Keir Starmer, once her biggest supporter, clearly disagrees.
So who’s to blame? Reeves, naturally, for being a bad Chancellor. Starmer, for believing she’d make a good one. And Starmer again, for not being honest about her position. Instead of thanking and politely firing her, he’s doing his usual trick. Evading the question in public, while quietly hoping the problem will just vanish. And it’s starting to look like she is.
