The Chancellor has a tormented look. It worries me.
Rachel Reeves has seen things no British chancellor should see (Image: Getty)
Rachel Reeves is leading the UK down the road to economic perdition, and it’s written all over her face. She looks like someone who knows exactly where this ends. If the public knew what she knows, there’d be a lot more haunted faces about.
The Chancellor is a changed woman from the bright, shiny figure strutting about after Labour’s election landslide, fresh from achieving her girlhood dream of becoming the UK’s first female chancellor. Today’s fixed, strained, thousand-yard stare suggests she’s had a grim private reckoning. She knows she’s doomed.
All politicians visibly age on the job. Even Tony Blair couldn’t keep his box-fresh look for long, acquiring the twitchy, unhinged stare of Harry Potter’s Mad-Eye Moody (regular proximity to Gordon Brown will do that to you).
PM Keir Starmer looks smaller, greyer and more diminished by the day, like a little vole cornered by hungry owls.
But the look Reeves has carried since her Parliamentary breakdown is deeper and more unsettling. It hints at knowledge she’d rather not possess, and truths the country hasn’t yet absorbed.
I have some sympathy. Being chancellor is a horrible job. But Reeves was happy to dish it out to the Conservatives, so she has to take it too. The criticism is fierce, and deserved.
She and Starmer repeatedly told voters they’d raise only raise taxes on private schools, non-doms and energy companies. The bill was meant to come to £8.5billion.
Within 18 months, she’s hit us all for £66billion, punishing tens of millions of “working people” who were explicitly told they wouldn’t be affected. It was an shameless lie.
The economy isn’t growing like she promised, it’s shrinking. The country is now staring down the barrel of what’s been dubbed the “Reevescession”.
She should be riddled with guilt but I don’t think than explains her haunted look. Something else is going on.
Reeves will never come close to balancing the books. Labour backbenchers won’t let her cut a penny in spending, and more tax hikes will only kill the growth we urgently need. As debt rises by the day, UK is on the edge of a fiscal abyss.
The Chancellor’s girlhood dream doesn’t conclude in triumph but in shattered hopes and a destroyed economy. But there’s another thing wearing her down. Nobody else in the Labour Party gives a damn.
Most Labour MPs and activists would rather not peer into the abyss at all. They prefer to believe spending can rise indefinitely, that more money can always be found for the public sector and welfare.
Point to the gaping black hole in Labour’s plans and they’ll stop waffling on about Tory austerity or how we need to tax the rich harder.
Reeves can’t do that. She’s seen the books. She knows where this road leads. And she understands who’ll be blamed when it all unravels.
It’s a lonely place to be. Then she looks at Keir Starmer and feels lonelier still. He’s no help. She spots Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, and fears the world has gone mad. Then she remembers Angela Rayner, and is certain of it. It’s a terrible position for any politician, and it’s there for all to see, etched across her face.
