The Mirror’s karaoke bash at the annual Labour Party conference is the political-prole version of the Spectator’s exclusive champagne party at the Tory conference. They are the ones for which all conference delegates covet invites.
There was a Keir Starmer-shaped hole at the Mirror party on the final evening of last month’s Labour conference; the new prime minister jetted off to New York for the United Nations general assembly.
In his absence, the House of Commons leader Lucy Powell opened the karaoke with the Oasis tune Don’t Look Back in Anger. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar did a duet of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk with Emily Thornberry, the MP who chairs the foreign affairs select committee. Meanwhile, culture secretary Lisa Nandy sang the Amy Winehouse number Valerie.
With Starmer away, the next two most senior members of the government present at the party were deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the exchequer.
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Neither of them sang. But if Reeves, who on Wednesday will deliver a tough UK budget in the House of Commons, had chosen to have a go, she might have tried a version of Abba’s famous ode to straitened finances, Money Money Money: “I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay/Ain’t it sad?/And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me/That’s too bad.”
While Reeves didn’t pick up the microphone at the Mirror party, she did, according to people there, sing the praises of the Republic’s fiscal duo, Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe. Reeves was overheard telling an Irish official at the party that she was delighted she had met “Jack and Paschal” earlier that month. Donohoe and Chambers had been on separate trips to London at the beginning of September. Both called in on Reeves.
Reeves had a £22 billion (about €26 billion) unfunded “black hole” to fill in Britain’s finances as soon as she started the job in July after Labour’s election win. In her budget on Wednesday, she faces a much tougher task: how to spur immediate economic growth while also funding Britain’s creaking public services and sticking to Labour’s much-vaunted election promise not to raise taxes on workers.
Reeves has got to achieve all of this while keeping the public finances under control and loosening fiscal rules to allow more borrowing. Arguably she faces the toughest economic conditions of any new chancellor since the second World War.
Many Labour insiders acknowledge that she certainly has a tougher task than Gordon Brown. When he took over as chancellor in 1997 following Labour’s landslide election victory under Tony Blair, the British economy was already growing at almost 5 per cent annually.
Even Alistair Darling, Labour’s chancellor during the financial crash of 2008, had an easier job than Reeves. Darling had basically no choice but to save Britain’s banks, as other nations in Europe and also the US were already bailing out their banks at the time, and so his central policy was in effect decided for him. Reeves must weigh myriad policy options, few attractive.
What sort of a woman and politician is Reeves? Does she have the steel required to make tough decisions? The financial kingpins of the City of London appear to believe she does. Reeves courted them assiduously before the election.
Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader and now a member of the House of Lords, distributed a Substack newsletter this week with a well-observed profile of “the Rachel Reeves I know”. Watson has been an acquaintance of hers since she was a teenage activist in the party.
He said she “rarely shows much of her personality in public beyond her passion for ideas”.
“In private, she is warm and friendly with a sharp sense of fun, though she’s always on guard,” Watson wrote. “She handles internal divides cautiously rather than through open confrontation.”
Watson concludes she is “more emotionally intelligent than her predecessors”. He says Reeves is less “party political” than Brown, but shares his “seriousness” and that she has a “reserved, compartmentalised approach to politics”.
There is another factor around Reeves’s appointment to the role as chancellor, however, that may hike the pressure on her further. She is the first woman in British history to do the job. This should not matter, but the reality of the Westminster press pack means scrutiny of her will be heightened.
“All the things I could do/If I had a little money/It’s a rich man’s world/Money, money, money/Must be funny/In the rich man’s world.”