Until lunchtime today, it appeared that humiliated Keir Starmer was the biggest political victim of the government’s welfare U-turn. The extraordinary and piteous sight of chancellor Rachel Reeves in tears in the Commons has changed that.
She rightly deserves sympathy for the huge personal toll the welfare revolt has clearly had on her. From the moment Labour was elected, Reeves has staked everything on balancing the nation’s books and filling the Conservatives’ “£22bn black hole”.
However, the welfare rebellion by her party has blown a further £5bn hole in her plans, making it impossible for her to keep her pledge of no further tax rises. The fact that more than 100 of her MPs were prepared, in effect, to treat her and her strategy with contempt, forcing her to rip it up, was a big enough blow to her self-esteem.
But she could console herself with the knowledge that her No 10 neighbour, the prime minister, had her back. Or so it seemed until Kemi Badenoch’s killer question in the Commons asking him if he could guarantee Reeves’s place as chancellor. When he failed to do so – although he has since backed her fully – the sight of Reeves’s crumpled features, apparently in tears, directly behind him, said it all. She knows the game is up.
Her every action, her political and personal style, since proudly becoming Britain’s first female chancellor, has been to create an image of the “Iron Chancellor”. Someone with the personal resolve of Tory “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, tempered by the humane prudence of Labour’s first Iron Chancellor, Gordon Brown.
Reeves (right) crying as Starmer speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions (House of Commons/UK Parliament)Behind her strong public face, cracks in her image have started to appear. There has been growing criticism over her first Budget, with national insurance rises for employers, and she has had to abandon her decision to scrap winter fuel payments for the elderly.
Controversies about exaggerating her CV and accepting “freebies” have not enhanced her attempt to show she leads by example. Now Reeves’s reputation as the Iron Chancellor has melted forever before our eyes.
Just a week ago, her position seemed impregnable. After her Commons breakdown, it is hard to see how she can survive in her job. At the least, she needs time to recover from the shock to her system. In any other professional field, she would be given compassionate leave. But politics is not a compassionate pastime; it is brutal. And running the country’s economy is too important to have an absent chancellor.
Not that replacing her would solve the crisis that now faces Starmer’s government. Reeves’s emotional reaction spoke of a deeper truth: the welfare revolt has not just scuppered her credibility – but Starmer’s, too. In recent weeks, Labour MPs have made it clear they can – and will – stop him doing anything they don’t like.
In 1993, as John Major’s Conservative government limped towards defeat, ravaged by internal revolts and indecision, his former chancellor, Norman Lamont, derided feeble Prime Minister Major, saying he was “in office but not in power”. That was after the Tories had run the country for 14 long years, with ever diminishing Commons majorities.
The extraordinary and alarming reality for Starmer is that just 12 months after winning a landslide election victory, he too is in office but not in power.
