Rachel Reeves insists she's ‘cracking on with the job' as she hugs Starmer after Commons tears
The united front came after the chancellor's tears in the Commons on Wednesday threatened to plunge the Labour government into turmoil following the chaos of the welfare reform vote.
In a bid to ease shattered nerves, the chancellor made a surprise appearance at the launch of the NHS 10-year plan in Stratford, east London, after the prime minister had moved overnight to guarantee her future in the Treasury.
Bond markets had reacted badly to Sir Keir refusing to say she was safe in her job during PMQs on Wednesday, where Ms Reeves appeared visibly upset while sitting behind the prime minister.
But a grinning Ms Reeves was bullish during the event on Thursday morning, in what was intended to be a confirmation of her close partnership with Sir Keir.
As a result, UK government bonds rallied and the pound steadied with reassurances from the prime minister about the chancellor's future.
Ms Reeves noticeably rolled her eyes at questions from reporters about her wellbeing and future in the job as Sir Keir insisted that she will be chancellor until the next election.
In contrast to his failure to stand up for her in the Commons on Wednesday, the prime minister was effusive about his chancellor at the NHS plan launch.
He said she was doing an "excellent" job, would remain in place beyond the next general election, and that they were both absolutely committed to the chancellor's "fiscal rules" to maintain discipline over the public finances.
Sir Keir said he did not "appreciate" that Ms Reeves was crying behind him at PMQs, as the event is "pretty wired".
"It goes from question to question and I am literally up, down, question, looking at who is asking me a question, thinking about my response and getting up and answering it," he said.
He added: "It wasn't just yesterday. No prime minister ever has had side conversations in PMQs. It does happen in other debates when there is a bit more time, but in PMQs it is bang, bang, bang, bang.
"That is what it was yesterday and therefore I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber."
Speaking on Wednesday night to the BBC's podcast Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Sir Keir provided the markets assurance: 'She will be chancellor by the time this is broadcast, she will be chancellor for a very long time to come, because this project that we've been working on to change the Labour party, to win the election, change the country, that is a project which the chancellor and I've been working on together.'
Alongside the pair at the health plan launch was health secretary Wes Streeting, who many are talking up as a potential replacement for Ms Reeves if she had been sacked .
Ms Reeves would not be drawn into answering questions about the "personal matter" which had upset her ahead of Wednesday's PMQs.
She told broadcasters: "Clearly I was upset yesterday and everyone could see that. It was a personal issue and I'm not going to go into the details of that.
"My job as chancellor at 12 o'clock on a Wednesday is to be at PMQs next to the Prime Minister, supporting the Government and that's what I tried to do.
"I guess the thing that maybe is a bit different between my job and many of your viewers' is that when I'm having a tough day it's on the telly and most people don't have to deal with that."
The chancellor rejected suggestions that her tears were related to a conversation with Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle or another member of government.
"People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday. Today's a new day and I'm just cracking on with the job," she added.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir wanted to refocus a traumatic week for his government on a positive announcement about fixing the NHS.
He hoped to put behind him the problems with welfare where his government was forced to abandon massive parts of its reforms leaving a £5bn black hole in their financial plans by removing personal independence payments (PIPs) for the disabled from the bill.
The new 10-year plan for the NHS sets out a series of shifts to bring care much closer to people's homes, reducing the reliance on hospitals and A&E.
Under the changes, there will be fewer staff working in the NHS than previous projections said were needed, with far more providing care closer to home and fewer working in hospitals.
Key reforms include a greatly enhanced NHS app to give patients more control over their care and more data at their fingertips, new neighbourhood health centres open six days a week and at least 12 hours a day, and new laws on food and alcohol to prevent ill health.
Sir Keir said: "It's all down to the foundation we laid this year, all down to the path of renewal that we chose, the decisions made by the Chancellor, by Rachel Reeves, which mean we can invest record amounts in the NHS."
With junior doctors threatening to strike again over pay, Mr Streeting told NHS staff gathered at the event that Labour rejected the "pessimism" which says the "NHS is a burden, too expensive, inferior to the market".
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Rachel Reeves says she cannot rule out autumn tax rises after ‘damaging' week
Rachel Reeves has said it is impossible for her to rule out tax rises in the autumn budget and insisted she never thought about quitting despite a turbulent week for her and the government. In an interview with the Guardian, the chancellor said 'there are costs' to the watering down of the welfare bill and acknowledged it had been a 'damaging' week for Downing Street. The chancellor's tears in the Commons on Wednesday spooked the financial markets and raised questions about her future in the job, but No 10 quickly weighed in behind her, saying she and the prime minister were in lockstep. Reeves said she had never considered resigning her position, despite being the focus of some Labour backbench anger over her handling of the economy, saying: 'I didn't work that hard to then quit.' She said she regretted going into prime minister's questions in tears after a 'tough day in the office' but hoped that people 'could relate' to her distress. 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Who's really to blame for Labour's troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM?
She is not the first chancellor to cry in public, and may not be the last. But Rachel Reeves is the first whose tears have moved markets. No sooner had the realisation dawned that she was silently weeping – over a personal sorrow she won't be pushed into revealing, she insisted later, not a political one – as she sat beside Keir Starmer at Wednesday's prime minister's questions, than the pound was dropping and the cost of borrowing rising. The bond traders who forced out Liz Truss's hapless chancellor still clearly rate her judgment and want her to stay, even if (perhaps especially if) some Labour MPs don't. Yet it is an extraordinary thing to live with the knowledge that a moment's uncontrolled emotion can drive up the cost of a nation's mortgages, just as a misjudged stroke of the budget pen can destroy lives. The most striking thing about her tears, however, was Starmer's failure to notice. Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it's the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government. Quite aside from whatever private grief she is now carrying, Reeves has for years been shouldering an exhausting load. From the start, she and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, did an unusual amount of the heavy lifting on behalf of their oddly apolitical leader – and in government the stakes have only risen. McSweeney, a natural fixer now jammed faintly awkwardly into a strategist's role, was once credited with near-mythical influence over Starmer, but for months is said to have been struggling at times to get the boss's ear. Reeves, meanwhile, has ended up by default running much of the domestic agenda, while Starmer focuses on foreign policy crises and a handful of big issues that passionately exercise him. Since even close aides and ministers complain of never really knowing what he wants, the result is a Treasury-brained government that tends to start with the numbers and work back to what's possible, rather than setting a political goal and figuring out how to reach it. Perhaps that makes sense to the City, but not to Labour MPs frogmarched through a series of politically toxic decisions with no obvious rationale except that the money's got to come from somewhere. To many of them, Starmer appears at best like a kind of political weekend dad: largely absent from everyday life and reluctant to get involved in political battles, but swooping in at the last minute to issue orders. Complaints of Downing Street dysfunction have been a staple under at least the last four prime ministers, but there's a weakness at the core of this No 10 that is putting the rest of government under undue strain, like a runner trying to push on through an injury who ends up pulling every other muscle in the process. On the left, there is growing talk of trying to force a 'reset' in spring, if next year's Scottish and Welsh elections go as badly as they assume: force Reeves out, let radicalism in, fight Reform's emotive rightwing fire with a form of leftwing populism perhaps loosely resembling what the Democrats' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are doing in the US. It's exactly what the markets fear, judging by their reaction to Reeves' temporary wobble. But even Labour MPs who'd never go that far are growing restless for change. Just raise taxes, cries this week's New Statesman magazine, echoing a widespread view that the fiscal straitjacket imposed by Reeves is killing the government. I argued for the same thing in the Guardian back in March, and haven't changed my mind. But the political cost of doing so is arguably higher now than it would have been then, when tax rises could plausibly still have been framed as an emergency response to Donald Trump pulling the plug on Europe's defence and forcing Britain to rearm, rather than as an admission that the government can no longer get its spending plans past its own backbenchers. In their understandable frustration, however, some fail to ask why Reeves holds the iron grip she does; why Treasury thinking isn't more often challenged by No 10. If this government's mistakes often have her fingerprints somewhere on them, then so do many of its successes. Last week, I was at a housing conference, surrounded by people still euphoric at getting everything they asked for in last month's spending review: unprecedented billions poured into genuinely affordable and social housing – with emphasis thankfully for once on the social – with a 10-year settlement from the Treasury, creating the long-term certainty they need to make it happen. Angela Rayner fought like a tiger for it, but Reeves made the money happen, and the result will change lives. Children who would have grown up in grim, frightening temporary accommodation will have safe, permanent homes. Vulnerable people will escape the clutches of unscrupulous landlords and first-time buyers will climb ladders otherwise out of reach. It's everything a Labour government exists to do, but as with so many unseen good things happening – on green energy, say, or transport – the money didn't fall from the sky and won't be there in future if an ageing and chronically unfit population carries on consuming welfare spending or health spending (the next big battleground, judging by the detail of Wes Streeting's 10-year plan) at current rates. To a frustrated Treasury, this week's rebellion was evidence that Labour MPs don't live in the real world, where hard choices must be faced for good things to happen. But, to the rebels, it's evidence that the Treasury doesn't live in their real world, where vulnerable people struggle with deep-rooted health problems only aggravated by being pushed into poverty, and the Greens as much as Reform are threatening to eat them for breakfast over it. There is some truth in both arguments. But that's precisely why it is ultimately a prime minister's job, and nobody else's, to draw all the threads of the government together: to balance political yin against economic yang, such that neither dominates or bends the project out of shape. Chancellors come and, eventually, even the best go. But sometimes it's only then that you can really tell whether the problem was ever really the chancellor. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
