Rachel Reeves is running out of road
The disastrous tax raid on business killed confidence and has landed the Chancellor - and the rest of us - in trouble.
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To say that shares in Rachel Reeves have declined in value since the Chancellor presented her Budget last autumn would be an understatement. Such is the scale of the run on Reeves in the Westminster bear market that it is commonplace to hear other politicians and people in business bring up in conversation the question of how long she can last in post, such has been the impact of her policies and loss of confidence in her abilities.
This fall is remarkable, when one considers the amount of hype that swirled around Reeves just a year ago in the run-up to the general election.
Big business leaders back then spoke admiringly of Reeves, probably reading far too much into their breakfast meetings with the then shadow chancellor in which if they had listened properly they would have understood the substance went about as far as “the Tories are terrible, here have another croissant.”
At the time it was pretty obvious they were being used, but chief executives with a genuine understanding of politics are now rare. Although a few business advisers did try to warn business leaders that this was an emperor’s new clothes scenario, and Reeves did not have a plan, they were not listened to. The fashion was to go along with believing in the illusion.
By the time Labour won its landslide election victory last summer the then unsackable Reeves and leader Keir Starmer were seen as being bound together as partners, almost equals, on a shared mission. Now, Starmer is clearly the boss, having grown in confidence and risen in status thanks to his handling of events on the international stage. Meanwhile, a reduced Reeves is having to scramble to prove her commitment to defence, a policy area about which she was notoriously sceptical as recently as January.