Rachel Reeves has thoroughly bungled her stint at Number 11. Her incompetence has shocked Starmer, who spent the election campaign telling voters how amazing she was. He must have been dazzled by her CV, a brilliant work of fiction.
He’s not dazzled anymore. It took the Tories 14 years and a pandemic to run up the £22billion black hole Reeves claimed to have inherited. She doubled it to more than £40billion in 14 chaotic months.
Starmer has had to walk behind her with a dustpan and brush, reversing her assault on the Winter Fuel Payment after a voter backlash, and cuts to welfare benefits following a rebellion by backbench MPs.
As the economy tanks and the nation’s finances spiral out of control, Starmer has had enough.
The upcoming Budget promises hellfire for Labour, as Reeves will hike taxes by anything between £20billion and £40billion.
The PM wants to keep a tight personal grip on the Budget because he no longer trusts Reeves to write it. Appointing a minder is the clearest possible vote of no-confidence in his over-promoted Chancellor.
Starmer has drafted in former Bank of England deputy governor Minouche Shafik as his chief economic adviser. She’s being spinned as a “world-leading economist”, but in reality she’s just another incompetent tax hiker.
Baroness Shafik, a Labour peer, quit as president of Columbia University after losing control of anti-Israel protests on campus.
She’s held a string of jobs at the London School of Economics, IMF and Bank of England, without doing anything of any note at any of them. They call it failing upwards.
Alongside pensions minister Torsten Bell, she co-chaired a Resolution Foundation report demanding raids on homes, shares and dividends.
Bell, parachuted into the Treasury to “mastermind” Reeves’s Budget, is another career wonk with a taste for glossy reports that always demand higher taxes.
Now Starmer has gone further to humiliate Reeves.
He’s nicked her Treasury adviser Darren Jones, shuffling him into No 10 as his chief secretary, supposedly to “deliver” policy.
Jones was Reeves’s deputy at the Treasury, and he also has form. He was forced to apologise in March for comparing disability benefit cuts to taking away a child’s pocket money, and jeered on BBC Question Time for claiming most Channel migrants were “children, babies and women”.
He has his fingers all over the disastrous decision to scrap the Winter Fuel Payment. Not exactly the fresh start Starmer needs as his popularity rating plummets.
As evidence of further turmoil, one of Starmer’s top spin doctors quit today as well. What a shambles.
Nothing has changed. All of these so-called experts are cut from the same Labour establishment cloth, all peddling the same tired answer: tax, tax and tax again.
Reeves isn’t the only one living on borrowed time. Starmer is too.
