Stride’s Hamlet gag saves Reeves from slings and arrows of economic fortune | John Crace
Share:
Instead of evaluating chancellor’s performance, her shadow apes rightwing press and calls for her sacking. You can only conclude that Conservative MPs are just too trusting for their own good. Either that or they are catatonically dim. The rest of us know enough to not always believe what we read on the front page of the rightwing papers, but Tory MPs seem to take everything at face value. If it’s in the paper, it must be true. It’s almost touching.
![[John Crace]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/John-Crace,-L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Tuesday’s front pages of the Mail and the Telegraph insisted Rachel Reeves’s time was up. Going to China while the international bond markets crept upwards was the last straw. The chancellor should resign. What’s more, the prime minister had expressed his “full confidence” in Reeves, which could only mean that he was about to sack her. Let’s just say that Monday had been a slow news day in Westminster and some hacks had decided to make mischief.
But for Tory MPs, Reeves’s departure was clearly a done deal. So they all headed off to the Commons in the expectation that the chancellor would do the decent thing. They would call for her to go and she would duly oblige. As I said, there’s no accounting for stupidity. After 14 years of government, they’ve forgotten how being in opposition works. Then again, they were used to changing the prime minister and cabinet at regular intervals, so they probably thought Labour would operate in the same way.
Not that Reeves was totally out of the woods. A chancellor doesn’t get to choose her inheritance and hers had been worse than most. And it was fair to say her budget hadn’t exactly thrilled business leaders who had been primed for growth. But she was a long way from getting sacked after just six months as a result of economic forces that were largely out of her control. And just to make sure, she came to the chamber with a phalanx of ministerial supporters. Though not Tulip Siddiq, who hadn’t been seen for days. There’s a woman whose job really was on the line.
