LETTS: Exit the Duchess of Delusion. Yet even as the tumbril jolts her towards Burnham's guillotine, Rachel Reeves refuses to accept what a honking failure she's been

By QUENTIN LETTS, PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER Published: 00:59, 24 June 2026 | Updated: 01:14, 24 June 2026 No fairy godmother ever promised that our first female Chancellor of the Exchequer would be up to the job. And so it has proved. Rachel Reeves, who yesterday teetered into the Commons for probably her last Treasury Questions, has been a honking, stonking failure. Not that she yet publicly accepts that. She stood at the despatch box and bellowed away in that Bernard Bresslaw voice that she was ‘proud’ of the Government’s achievements. She would ‘take Labour’s record any day’ over that of the Conservatives. And she had no intention of leaving. ‘I will continue to deliver for the British people,’ cried the Duchess of Delusion, even as the tumbril jolted her towards Andy Burnham’s gleaming guillotine. Westminster is openly gossiping about the identity of her successor – will it be Wes Streeting or Ed Miliband or someone else? No one, save presumably Ms Reeves herself, believes she can continue in the job. Despite her professed self-confidence she has become a pitiful spectacle. In the case of Sir Keir Starmer it was reportedly his wife who finally convinced him to quit. Is there nobody able to do the same humane service for poor Rachel? How different it all was in July 2024 when, days after taking office and dressed like the branch manager of a provincial building society, she summoned reporters to her new domain. She announced that the Conservatives had left a ‘black hole’ in official spending plans. The economy, she claimed with relish, was much worse than Labour’s economics experts had anticipated. She stood at the despatch box and bellowed away in that Bernard Bresslaw voice that she was ‘proud’ of the Government’s achievements, writes Quentin Letts Reeves was looking rather glum during Andy Burnham's swearing-in at Westminster Sir Keir himself added that things were likely to get worse before they improved. It was one of his few predictions that actually proved correct. The Reeves-Starmer doom and gloom barrage was done for clunking political reasons – namely a desire to hammer blame into the defeated Tories. It had an instant, disastrous effect from which the Starmer government would never recover: it killed optimism. Ms Reeves said that the first ‘mission’ was economic growth. An acquaintance of mine who went to see her in those early days politely asked how she intended to achieve that growth. Three trite things tripped off her tongue. The first was ‘no more Tory chaos’, which she claimed had deterred international investors from bringing their billions to Britain. When those investors heard the ‘black hole’ narrative they legged it as rapidly as Old Testament merchants fleeing the lepers who had to ring a handbell and shout ‘unclean! unclean!’ as they walked the streets. Ms Reeves’ second answer to my acquaintance was that she intended to revamp planning laws to start a building boom. She did not seem to understand that planning changes take years to bear fruit. The third thing with which she proposed to create growth was Ed Miliband’s green revolution, the main consequence of which, we have since seen, has been to kill jobs in the oil and gas sectors. That was widely predicted. Not that Ms Reeves listened. She has no taste for challenge and displays little understanding of business. The feral spirits that drive entrepreneurship were alien to her, and indeed they were to the whole Starmer Cabinet, which contained not a single business person. A low point for Reeves came last year when she cried in the Commons during PMQs By equal turns delusional and desperate, she is now wriggling and writhing for her political life, hoping not to be sacked, writes Quentin Letts Nor, as has often been evident in the Commons, had Ms Reeves a grip on political dialectic. She did not argue using theory and fact. Her debating props, instead, were sloganistic assertion and partisan ‘whataboutery?’ She did not try reason. She just attacked ‘the party opposite’. She was at it again yesterday. Assertion: ‘Our economic plan is the right one.’ Whataboutery: attacking the Opposition for past mistakes, even accusing the Lib Dems of having been part of the Cameron government post 2015. Which they were not. Further ordure was heaped on the hated Tories when in late July 2024 she made another crass mistake and cut some winter fuel payments for the elderly. This, again, was attributed to the ‘black hole’, but that slogan had by then ceased to work, so leadenly had it been over-used by ministers. The public disliked the winter fuel cuts and they blamed Ms Reeves, not Rishi Sunak. Being in government meant making choices, not just pointing a finger. The Budget of October 2024 was the first to be delivered by a woman. Good for her. As she put it on that self-confident day: ‘To girls and young women everywhere, let there be no ceiling on your ambition, your hopes and your dreams. Along with the pride I feel standing here today there is also a responsibility to pass on a fairer society and a stronger economy to the next generation of women.’ As the father of two daughters in their 20s, your sketchwriter is all for offering encouragement to young women. But true feminism means judging women by the same measure one imposes on men. As regards ‘ceilings on ambition,’ and passing on ‘a stronger economy to the next generation’, that first Budget was a shocker. It increased National Insurance contributions, making it dearer for employers to take on staff. Death taxes were whacked upwards – there is nothing dignified about Chancellors picking the pockets of shrouds – as were capital gains taxes. Spending on welfare was increased and there were pay rises for Labour’s friends in the public-sector unions. The result of all this: more state borrowing, more unemployment for the next generation. And so it has continued. Taxes have soared. Public spending has ballooned like Cyril Smith’s smalls on a washing line. The private sector has been thumped. And Rachel Reeves seems pleased. In the Commons yesterday she was boasting about it. She said she had raised £30billion from hitting non-doms and corporate jet owners and ‘more wealthy people’. Who did she mean by that? Farmers, whose families were poleaxed by new inheritance tax laws? Teachers and parents at independent schools, who were savaged by the sudden imposition of VAT on fees? Small-business owners, who had to sack junior staff to balance their books after that entirely counterproductive National Insurance rise? The non-doms, meanwhile, just decamped en masse for the lower taxes of Italy and Portugal. Any fool could have seen it was going to happen. But one fool didn’t. Ms Reeves, 47, joined the Labour Party when she was 16. Her father told her they were a Labour family and that was that. After secondary school in Beckenham she read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford and did postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). None of those educational establishments left her with much obvious independence of thought. Did the LSE not teach her about the Laffer Curve, which shows how higher taxes can lead to lower revenue for the state? Having watched Rachel Reeves from the Commons Press gallery over the years, I don’t think I have ever been surprised by her. She has never said anything original or intellectually snappy. For one who has risen so far, she seems amazingly shallow. A little brittle, too. To this is allied a distinct air of entitlement. Speaker Hoyle yesterday urged her to keep her answers short. Our snooty duchess responded with a flick of imperious fringe, a roll of the eyes. Her whole being screamed haughty froideur. With junior colleagues she has never been terribly clubbable. At the time of the benefits rebellion last year there was an extraordinary story that she had shouted so unsympathetically to a disabled MP that the Whips had to intervene. Soon afterwards came the PMQs at which, notoriously, she started crying, tears coursing down her cheeks while she was sitting beside Sir Keir. Journalists were told that it was a personal matter. In a wider political sense this was not entirely true, even if the cause of those tears was in part domestic. For a Chancellor to weep uncontrollably on the Government front bench was a parliamentary moment with possible economic consequences. You can’t boast about breaking down gender barriers and then try to re-erect them by demanding special treatment because she is a woman. We would never treat a male politician that way. As for the gander, so for this goose of a Chancellor. Then there was the curious matter of her curriculum vitae, which led Reform’s Lee Anderson to nickname her ‘Rachel from Accounts’. She professed to have worked at HBOS as an economist. Closer inspection of the facts suggested she had worked in the complaints department, and for shorter than claimed. There had been a spell of unemployment, although now she was the Chancellor who said that people who could work must work. She said, furthermore, that she had worked at the Bank of England for ‘the best part of a decade’. This was found to be more like four and a half years. Details, schmetails! Come, come, who cares about a little numerical inexactitude? She’s only running the Treasury. Does she now take the same attitude to her economic record? In the Commons yesterday she insisted that borrowing was low. Her Tory opponent, Sir Mel Stride, suggested she was in fact borrowing ‘one quarter of a trillion pounds more than the plans she inherited’. How about defence spending? ‘The biggest uplift since the Cold War,’ claimed Ms Reeves. Her former Cabinet colleague John Healey, who quit as Defence Secretary, said she was ‘unwilling’ to fund defence properly. And on the tenth anniversary of the referendum in which we voted for independence from the EU, she claimed Brexit had been ruinous for our economy, costing us 8 per cent of GDP. She simultaneously boasted that we are ‘the fastest growing country in the G7 within the EU’. It’s hard to argue both those positions. At the despatch box she stuttered, blinked and pushed down hard on her larynx. As a theatre act she has always been unconvincing. Yesterday her eyes darted to one side. She looked hunted. In her lack of heft, indeed in her economic haplessness, she is probably the worst Chancellor since ‘boom to bust’ Anthony Barber of the Heath government in the 1970s. She has spent like a drunken sailor while borrowing costs have risen higher than under Kwasi Kwarteng’s brief tenure in the Truss experiment. By equal turns delusional and desperate, she is now wriggling and writhing for her political life, hoping not to be sacked. Surely it will be to no avail. A Chancellor is almost as big a part of a Government as its PM. Reeves enjoyed unusual freedom, for Sir Keir had sparse interest in economic affairs. He relied on his Chancellor to get the big decisions right and she goofed it. On her likely final parliamentary outing she remained insistent, indignant, hopeless. When Sir Keir quit on Monday a protester blasted him with Beethoven’s Ode To Joy. When Rachel Reeves quits, as quit she surely must, she deserves to be serenaded by the old Bernard Bresslaw novelty song I Found A Hole: ‘I found a hole in my Christmas stocking, now all my Christmas dreams have fallen froo.’ The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? 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