If the name Steve Reed means little to you, rest assured that is a pothole he is eager to fill. Having replaced Angela Rayner as housing secretary, he bounded around Labour conference last month dishing out Maga-red caps stamped with his credo “Build Baby Build!”. Headgear and slogan have both been filched from that very rightwing guy in the White House – because, like Robert Jenrick, Steve Reed is what happens when self-identified centrists turn populist.

Imagine Donald Trump had, years ago, swerved TV fame to become instead ward councillor for Brixton Hill. Imagine if Trump had no towers, but knew his way round a Travelodge. Most of all, imagine this scene from the conference fringe, recounted by Inside Housing magazine:

“Steve Reed skipped into the room only once the well-orchestrated chanting by his party faithful was deemed loud enough to the tune of We Built This City by Starship. He then took to the stage and proceeded to throw more signed and branded merchandise into the crowd, before cracking open a bottle of alcohol because ‘all builders need a beer’.

“One sector professional’s response to the proceedings was ‘dear God’.”

Steve Reed: he built this city, he built this city on rock’n’roll.

Except there is no building, baby. Labour was elected last year on a pledge of 1.5m new homes by the end of this parliament, yet in private, Reed’s officials already accept they will end up breaking that promise. Take London, where the government wants 88,000 homes finished before January. That goal was always a huge stretch but now it looks like a joke: so far this year ground has broken on just 3,248 new units. The figure comes from the consultancy Molior, which says that one in every six major housing projects is frozen: “schemes are halted, with the gates padlocked”.

The shortfall is so vast as to sow panic in government and to push No 10 into a........

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