Rachel Reeves has been speaking to the newspapers trying to sell her Budget, which given her communication abilities is a bit like asking King Herod to do your babysitting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be getting the excuses in early; it’s almost as if she, like everyone else, knows that next week’s announcements will be a catastrophe.

The thread that comes through the article is that the country is somehow being punished for the Chancellor’s teenage insecurities

Reeves’s big message is that she’s been ‘underestimated all her life’. A humbler person might wonder why everyone has consistently assessed her to be not up to the job rather than assuming that the judgement of everyone ever has been wanting. I want to assure Rach that most of us do not underestimate her at all; we know she’s capable of getting much, much worse.

In an ‘away from the cameras’ piece with the FT, one of Reeves’s most tiresome tropes rears its head. There is an exceptionally tedious idea in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s head that people challenge her because she’s a woman and not because she is turning the British economy into a clown car. In the FT piece we see a classic example of this when a local business leader in Scotland challenges Reeves ‘robustly… she believes rudely’ about her taxes on North Sea oil and gas. He doesn’t get an answer about economics but a hectoring on gender politics instead. “‘Talk to me with respect’ Reeves says, glaring........

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