Frustration grows with chancellor locked away in Treasury and facing competing challenges for her historic speech
and his government had been in office for 100 difficult days. Far-right riots, rows between top officials in No 10, a furore over freebies in an administration claiming to be in the service of the nation. Starmer now refers to them as “choppy days”, and the latter two as “side winds” he insists will not push him off course.
Reeves has, they say, locked herself away in the Treasury, agonising over what to do. “We can’t get anywhere near her,” one cabinet colleague said. “We can’t get past Darren,” they said, referring to Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, who is Reeves’s number two and effective gate keeper.
No new occupant of the post can ever have faced so many competing challenges. One – notably the £22bn black hole in the public finances she inherited – can rightly be blamed on 14 years of Tory government. Others, more strategic and tactical, are of Labour’s own making. They have boxed themselves in.
Now the time to begin to deliver growth and repair public services while not raising working peoples’ taxes is only 17 days away. “They have made life much harder for themselves because they have ruled out putting up income tax, VAT or increasing working people’s national insurance. Between them that is about 75% of all revenue.”
The expectation in Whitehall is that Reeves will move to raise many billions by hiking employers’ national insurance contributions, after Starmer refused to rule this out at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday.
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