A spectre is haunting Rachel Reeves. It has the tonsure of an abbot and a jawline kept taut by intermittent fasting, but any trace of asceticism is dispelled by its perma-smirk: a half-smile, half-jeer that taunts “I’ve got one over you!” It is the spectre of George Osborne.

I am not the only one to see his shade. Other commentators have observed this week how the new chancellor has copied her predecessor’s trick of beaming over the threshold of No 11, before scowling like Captain Renault and claiming to be Shocked! Shocked! at the debauchery inside.

Osborne decried “thirteen years of fiscal irresponsibility” when he became chancellor in 2010; Reeves fulminates against “fourteen years of … economic irresponsibility”. Just weeks after taking office, Osborne unveiled an “emergency budget”; moving even faster, Reeves has just launched a “public spending audit”. He vowed to “fix the roof”; Reeves pledges to “fix the foundations”.

Westminster may applaud this as excellent sport; for the rest of us, the problem is the rules by which it is played. Reeves is doing more than lifting tactics from a master tactician. Mr Austerity is also providing her framing and logic.

Mimicking Osborne, she attacks her opponents for “maxing out the credit card”. She likens one of the richest economies in the world to families scrabbling around for grocery money: “When household budgets are stretched, families have to make difficult choices. And government needs to do the same.” And where he railed against Gordon Brown’s “broken Britain”, she accuses Rishi Sunak of leaving a Britain that is “broke and broken”.

Even when these phrases were........

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