Whether and why Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, cried during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions session in the House of Commons is really neither here nor there.

It is, I suppose, understandable that we have instantly shifted our focus onto the fate of Ms Reeves rather than the fate of her government. Politics is a brutal business and if, as seems clear, she had reason to be distressed for non-work reasons, it would have merely compounded the many reasons she has to be distressed as a result of troubles directly related to her job.

It is one year today since this country elected the Labour Party as the antidote to what had become a chaotic Tory term in office. The idea, which seemed fairly sound at the time, was that Ms Reeves and her Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, were so boringly competent that we could all get on with our lives and not really worry about what was going on at Westminster.

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How wrong we were. How many people could honestly make the case for this being a more stable foundation for growth than that which was being provided by Rishi Sunak and Sir Jeremy Hunt, the Tory predecessors in these posts? The money markets certainly do not seem to be convinced of that particular case.

Generally speaking, three things have conspired against Sir Keir and Ms Reeves. The first is that Labour’s win 365 days ago was far more slender than its parliamentary majority would suggest. At only a little over one-third of the vote, this was no great........

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