Rachel Reeves's tears were ours after a year of Keir Starmer

Times

3 days ago

Rachel Reeves's tears were at once mortal and mythical. Each droplet running down her face took a point off the pound, set those mysterious dark forces the bond markets howling. She's the goose who lays the golden eggs in reverse: the woman who can leak away her country's wealth with every tear.
Poor Rachel Reeves. The first female chancellor is made not of iron but all too human flesh. Will there be conversations now about how women holding this office are a fiscal risk, too mutable to maintain the sphinx-like calm capitalism demands?
• Bond yields rise and pound falls as Starmer fails to back Reeves
The most unforgiving voices I've heard are in fact those of older women, shoulder-pad-era survivors, who had to spend their careers aping powerful men. Don't give those bastards the satisfaction of calling you 'emotional': keep it all tamped down until you reach the sanctity of the ladies' loo or your own car. Men, I find, just accept that crying is what women do.
And it is. Crying is a substitute for smashing phones or hard drinking, for landing punches, shouting or stewing in silence alone. It is our superpower, release valve and restart button, and a key reason suicide is four times more prevalent among men. The mistake is to assume all tears spring from the same source: women cry not out of weakness but rage, frustration, despair or as a last defence to say 'enough now, I can't take any more'.
So what was going on at PMQs? To judge from her slump-shouldered, kicked dog mien, Reeves had reached her limit. In her puffy face was every four-hour night's sleep, bleak spreadsheet and bitter meeting. Was the cause, as claimed, 'personal'? If so, one wonders not just why she entered the chamber but why she turned up extraneously the next day in east London at the NHS launch, wearing a ton of make-up and a rictus smile. But then isn't all of our vicious modern politics personal?
More revealing is the PM's behaviour. Keir Starmer said later that in the heat of PMQs he hadn't noticed his chancellor's distress — though she'd sat right beside him and he'd turned to her for help finding a reference in his notes. I was reminded of an anecdote in Tom Baldwin's biography about a young Starmer so focused on his law studies he didn't notice burglars in his flat stealing the TV. The story is offered as an example of Starmer's single-minded focus. But now we see a uni-tasking 60-something man without the emotional intelligence to bridge the competing demands of this awful moment, then next day — like a husband hastily buying petrol station flowers — staging a hug of compassion for the cameras.
Reeves had endured a year of being marched into battle to make cuts to our untenable, bloated welfare system, whether winter fuel payments or PIP (personal independence payment). Starmer let her argue the case, take the flak, then, because he lacked the charisma, conviction, leadership or nerve to bring enough MPs from his vast majority with him, left her swinging in the wind.
Almost all of the government's achievements that Starmer reeled off, as Reeves's lower lip quivered, involved more public spending. Breakfast clubs, free school meals, more social housing and NHS appointments: lovely, safe, core Labour promises. It was Reeves's job, peering down that infamous fiscal black hole, to pay for them all. And against the party's grain she wrestled with difficult choices a Starmer government promised not to balk at. Now she's back at the Treasury, £5 billion short, staring into an abyss.
Reeves's tears reflect the national mood on this government's first anniversary. The country, especially those of us who saw in Starmer a chance for dull technocratic calm after a decade of chaos, share her frustration, rage, despair. This Labour government wasn't supposed to fall into the usual traps, wasn't just going to tax business and expand the welfare state, but would re-establish the social contract's first principles. Crime will be punished; if you are severely incapacitated the state will help you, otherwise you must work; control national borders. This is basic governance. And now it is not just hard to deliver logistically or financially but ideologically, too.
A group of Labour backbenchers, around 100, are certain they will be one-term MPs. Reform is growing, and an alliance between Greens, Corbynites and Islamic sectarians is spreading in the Midlands and university towns. Untethered from an aloof Labour leader, backbenchers have a choice: uphold a doomed Starmer government they see as right-leaning, or follow their own social justice passions. Yeah, the voters dumped me — but dammit, I stayed pure.
After the welfare debacle they are likely to echo Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty: 'You don't get to tell me what to do ever again.' Starmer's only option, according to Blue Labour's Lord Glasman, is to call their bluff: let's make this a confidence vote, fall in line or we'll call a general election now. As if Starmer, who has bottled out of every battle, has the guts.
Meanwhile, an extraordinary 1,000 more people are signed up to PIP every day with the government not even reapplying the basic filter of face-to-face checks, and this week 2,000 more small boat migrants arrived requiring free hotel rooms. Rents rose 7 per cent in a year, firms are holding off hiring because of NI rises, shoplifting is soaring, no one expects the police to investigate a snatched phone or a stolen car. To say the country is broken is to disrespect the legions who work so hard — but it is chronically stalled. If Starmer can't rally his party, Reform will feast upon these problems — and who will be crying then?