Rachel Reeves will resign. That’s a certainty. And it will happen sooner rather than later.
It must be odd for Reeves to be sitting and polishing her own execution order to then read it out in front of colleagues with millions more cheering at home.
There is no possibility that a Chancellor could break such an important manifesto pledge as not increasing income tax and hope to survive.
It will be the reason that many halfwits (those stupid enough to believe a Labour promise) will have voted for Labour.
I heard Charles Clarke, the lumbering buffoon who was Neil Kinnock’s chief of staff and went on to be fired as Home Secretary under Blair, explaining on BBC’s Five Live’s Matt Chorley show that Starmer had to promise no rises because if he didn’t it would dominate the General Election ie were the Socialists going to suddenly push taxes through the roof having won a majority?
During the summer of last year, there wasn’t a senior politician in the land who, when questioned by the media, didn’t say, 'Read my lips, no income tax rise'. Surely, Labour should be done under trading standards.
That, Mr Clarke will know only too well, is the reason we have manifestos. To give a rock-solid assurance to voters that, unless something like a war happens, there will be no dramatic increase in taxes the minute they get the keys to No.10.
And Reeves promptly smashed that pledge to smithereens.
(A brief aside on Mr Clarke. When chief-of-staff to Neil Kinnock, he came to see me when editing The Sun in Wapping. I had invited him ahead of the 1992 election to discuss if the paper might have a better relationship with the Welsh windbag. Clarke made his leader’s position quite clear.
He hated Murdoch, hated me, hated the paper and then when he came to power, Kinnock would get even with us.
A nasty surprise in Rachel Reeves' Budget paves the way for her firing and Britain's collapse - Kelvin MacKenzie
|Getty Images
I called Murdoch and suggested we should do it to them before they did it to us. We campaigned every day against the Lefty s**tbag with such joys as reaching out to dictators beyond the grave (Stalin, Hitler, etc) all endorsing him.
And on election day wrote the headline: ‘’If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights." Kinnock credits that headline with costing him the election. If Clarke had been more friendly, it could have been so different.)
I digress. Reeves simply has to go. No ifs and buts.
Everybody from Starmer downwards knows that is the case. As Daniel Finkelstein, the Times columnist, pointed out, when James Callaghan was Chancellor in 1967, he quit because he had been assuring everybody that the pound wouldn’t be devalued, and suddenly Prime Minister Harold Wilson devalued it.
So, he quit. Wilson begged him to stay, but Callaghan was having none of it and, with Wilson fearing the government would collapse with his exit, offered him Home Secretary, and he accepted it.
That, I expect, will be the blueprint for Reeves. Reluctantly, Starmer will offer her the Home Office patch, but, unlike Callaghan, she will turn it down, knowing that she will forever be a lightning rod of economic criticism.
I expect Shabana Mahmood to be in at No.11 by March at the latest. In the meantime, Labour’s standing in the polls will have fallen to between 12-14 per cent, with the Greens up at 20 per cent. Thanks to Labour’s incompetence, what will happen to the left is exactly what has happened to the Right.
Just like social media politics is splintering.
Normally, there is a queue of American banks to hire Chancellors when they defenestrate. That won’t be the case for Reeves. Who would want to hire a failure?
Back to manning the complaints desk. She should never have left.
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