After her jaunt to the O2, Rachel Reeves may be aware that the musical oeuvre of Sabrina Carpenter includes I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, Bad for Business, Couldn’t Make It Any Harder, Feels Like Loneliness and Rescue Me.

Tunes for the chancellor to hum when she contemplates her approval ratings, which have tanked to the point where her unpopularity is now perilously close to matching the depths plumbed by Kwasi Kwarteng during his brief and calamitous stint at the Treasury. She is almost completely friendless in the media. Rightwing outlets blame the paucity of growth on higher business taxes while voices of the left decry reductions to incapacity benefits as balancing the books on the backs of the poor. The public mood is grim. The Opinium poll that is published today suggests that only half of those who voted Labour in 2024 think this government is handling the economy better than the Conservative one that the country evicted last July. Thinktank world reckons that last week’s spring statement was a can-kicking exercise that leaves the fiscal position fragile and the government at the mercy of events. Planned reductions to welfare payments are generating a sulphurous atmosphere among Labour backbenchers and this will not dissipate anytime soon. Implementing these cuts requires putting them into law. This means that horrified disability charities and other appalled groups will have many weeks to campaign against the legislation while venting their outrage at Labour parliamentarians. “This is not what Labour MPs came into politics to do,” says one of their number who would normally be counted as a loyalist.

Can the chancellor survive so much opprobrium and opposition? Yes she can, so long as she still has a friend at Number 10. The opinion that matters to her most is that held by the prime minister. He may be no economist, but he will be the ultimate decider when, and if, her number is up. In the early 80s, Sir Geoffrey Howe had a much grimmer stretch of his chancellorship than she is enduring now,........

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