Rachel Reeves sounded like she was fighting for her political life

Delivering her spending review, the chancellor even made her theatrical opposite number look convincing – she needs to rediscover her firebrand energy and win Labour MPs back onside, says John Rentoul

Rachel Reeves’s spending review, setting out budgets for government departments, was peppered with references to her backbench colleagues, as she thanked her “honourable friends” from one constituency after another for making the case for more investment in their area, and announced that she was happy to oblige.

This is a trend that has grown in recent years. The great proponent of it was George Osborne, who used Budgets and other set-piece speeches to assert the Treasury’s power and to build his network of supporters in the party. He copied it from Gordon Brown, who used the Treasury as a base from which to campaign for the succession.

Reeves’s tone was rather different. She has dominated the Commons in the past, fearlessly swatting aside Conservative onslaughts and rousing her own side with partisan slogans thunderingly delivered. Not today.

Today, she seemed less confident, and her naming and thanking of Labour MPs sounded less like a ruler building her empire and more like a politician pleading for her political life. All the handouts to local schemes for transport, libraries and social housing seemed to be aimed at persuading MPs not to turn against her.

She knows she is up against it – less than a year into a government with a huge majority. At the election, her steadiness under fire and insistence on fiscal responsibility, with metaphors about rocks and iron cladding, was an asset to Labour. Now, a well-timed heckle from the Tory side as she was talking about assets and liabilities on the government balance sheet captured the view of a growing number of Labour MPs that she is a “liability”.

Reeves knows that she has lost ground with public opinion, which might be expected of a new chancellor having to make tough choices to repair the public finances, which were left in terrible shape. But she has also lost popularity in the Labour Party. In last week’s LabourList poll of party members carried out by Survation, she came bottom of the league table of cabinet ministers in favourability, below Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, and Keir Starmer.

‘It would be unfair if Starmer were to move her, given how unpopular he is, and how much he has contributed to Reeves’s problems by pushing her to U-turn on the winter fuel payment cut. But politics is not fair’ (House of Commons)

Survation also asked Labour members: “If Keir Starmer does not lead the Labour Party into the next general election, who do you think should be leader?” Reeves did not feature in the list of 14 names featured in LabourList, topped by Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting.

Someone on social media asked about the omission of her name: was this because she was not included in the question, or because she is so unpopular? Well, Survation has now published the full tables, so I can answer the question: it is because she is so unpopular. Only 0.5 per cent of Labour members chose her from a list of 25 names as their first preference as an alternative leader.

She might protest that she has no ambition to be leader – as Rayner did at the weekend (“Absolutely not; I don’t want to be leader of the Labour Party”) – but that is not true in either case. And even if Reeves would be satisfied with being the first female chancellor, she doesn’t want to be an unpopular one, wounded by speculation that the prime minister might decide that he agrees with the Tory heckler.

It would be unfair if Starmer were to move her, given how unpopular he is, and how much he has contributed to Reeves’s problems by pushing her to U-turn on the winter fuel payment cut. But politics is not fair, and so she has to fight to try to keep Labour MPs, and party members, onside.

Hence her repeated insistence that the tough choices she has made are “Labour choices”. She knows that Labour members and MPs think that the choices she and Starmer have made so far have not reflected the party’s values.

In a spending review statement in which she had nothing new to say – all the new detail was contained, in hard-to-understand form, in the document published when she sat down – she won the loudest cheers for mere rhetoric, repeating the party’s attack on parents with children at private schools.

But this was the first occasion since the election that the Conservatives had the edge in the Commons. Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, is a little theatrical for some tastes, but his central argument seemed undeniably accurate: that she is a “spend now, tax later” chancellor who will have to come back for more tax rises in the autumn.

And Stride’s peroration struck home: “There she sits, powerless to resist her disillusioned MPs and her panicking prime minister, like a cork on the tide, the drumbeat for U-turns pounding in her ears.”

Suddenly, this started to feel like a government – and a chancellor – that has been in power for a long time.