Our writer ruminates on the impossible situation that Chancellor Reeves has created for herself 

We are in the run up to the Budget. Did you guess, O readers? Have you missed the constant series of tax-raising ideas attributed to anonymous Treasury sources (actually Torsten Bell or his minions) in the public prints? Each kite is briefly flown, then disappears. Stamp Duty, Capital Gains Tax, Pension Taxes etc. rise precipitously before crashing to earth, usually on the head of Rachel Reeves herself.

Truth is, the Treasury is in a proper bind. The Conservative Party, with its impressive tin ear for communications on social media, has dubbed the current – note that word – Chancellor as ‘Rachel Thieves’. This implies that our Rachel is an cunning Fagin, ready to pick a pocket or two (million), when in fact she is a complete plonker with all the economic smarts of Mr. Micawber, minus the charm. Nothing is going right for her, and it's all her own fault (not helped by Keir Starmer’s election promises and Ed ‘Industry Destroyer’ Miliband, to be fair).

Reeves is also engaged in a wrestling match with the Office of Budget Responsibility, one in which she is outweighed by quite a few pounds. It was observed in ‘1066 And All That’ that every time Mr. Gladstone guessed the answer to the Irish Question, the Irish changed the question. So too with Rachel and the OBR, which keeps amending its (largely fictional) forecasts and assumptions to ensure that she will never have enough money to meet her fiscal rules.

Little sympathy is due to a Chancellor who has secured a job for which she is manifestly underqualified and unfitted. Swift is sorry to be so old school, but can we really have confidence in a senior politician who weeps on the front bench? Showing emotion is one thing – fine in the right context - 'poor me' tears quite another. Heat and kitchen, dear.

Yet Reeves is but a symptom of a broken system. A system in which Starmer, even knowing he was going to win big, still lied to the electorate about his plans for tax and spend. His mad claims about no taxes on working people have collided with a complete inability in government to cut spending, and the big ticket items (VAT, income tax, employee NI) are thus immovable. Giving it straight from the shoulder seems to have vanished as part of the Labour playbook. Yet parties that buck that trend, like Reform, are doing well.

We are dealing with a system where an elected politician like Reeves feels she has to dance like a monkey while the OBR grinds the organ. No-one voted for the OBR. It was invented to provide a convenient cover for unpopular decisions, but now squats like a giant toad in the road, blocking any policies which however meritorious, don’t ‘count’ in its projections. So the Chancellor's evil genius, the aforementioned T. Bell, has to dream up magic spells to balance the books. Sadly for Reeves, he is no Harry Potter.

If the nation needed a demonstration of why this broken system needs a dose of Popular Conservatism, this is it. Let us away with the quangos and the experts. Back to democratic accountability and ministers who take tough decisions. Yes, it is very late to reform, but it is not too late.