Labour die-hards think she’ll be the star of the show if the party wins the general election. They see her as smart, serious and committed, who will do what it takes to get Britain growing again.
While Starmer is doing all he can to soothe sceptical voters, her role is to convince the party faithful that Labour will bring radical change.
It’s a double act that worked well for Labour in 1997, helping the party to a landslide as Tony Blair smiled at floating voters while Gordon Brown winked at the left.
Brown was supposed to be the intellectual driving force of New Labour. Reeves has the same role today.
Their tactics are the same, too.
Brown promised to stick to Tory spending plans for two years, while he conducted a thorough review of spending priorities.
Reeves is following the same playbook, pledging known new income tax and national insurance increases, while she “methodically” identifies ways of paying for spending pledges.
Brown was known as the Iron Chancellor. I’ve seen Reeves called that, too. Which worries me. Because Brown made some huge errors that cost the country a fortune.
In fact, we’re still paying for many of them.
Like Brown, Reeves is playing her cards close to her chest.
We know she will scrap the VAT exemption on private school fees, target non-doms and stiffen tax rules on private equity investors.
And that’s all we know.
We’ll only discover her true plans after the election, just as we did with Gordon Brown.
Brown didn’t tell us that he was going to launch a brutal £5billion a year stealth tax raid that singlehandedly destroyed the nation’s gold-plated final salary pension schemes.
That’s cost savers more than £200billion and counting. Millions are poorer in retirement as a result.
Brown followed this with another howler, by flogging off half of the nation’s gold reserves with prices at a 20-year low. That cost us up to £30billion.
He then doubled down on the ruinous Public Private Partnership, which will have cost us another £200billion when it finally ends around 2040.
Brown famously deluded himself into thinking that he had put a stop to what he called “Tory boom and bust”. He’d done no such thing, of course.
Convinced he could do no wrong, he let a property and banking boom rage out of control, while squandering the proceeds on Labour’s pet projects.
Brown was running a budget deficit of three percent a year, piling up the nation’s debts, when the financial crisis struck in 2008. Labour like to slam Tory austerity but Brown didn’t leave them much choice.
You think voters hate the Tories today. They hated Brown just as much.
In 2009, The Guardian described him thus: “Beleaguered, so unpopular and seemingly exhausted, so apparently luckless and unsuited to the job, that he attracts general ridicule and even pity”.
And The Guardian is a Labour-supporting newspaper. Imagine what his political enemies said about him.
And now we have the heir to Brown in Rachel Reeves.
My guess is she’s less psychologically flawed than Gordon Brown. I hope so. Because in so many other ways, she looks set to take us back down exactly the same path.
