Hang on, is Rachel Reeves now getting ‘mansplaining’ mansplained to her?

The chancellor of the exchequer has called out the ‘misogyny’ she has faced in public life in the build-up to the Budget – only for men to tell her it isn’t sexist at all. Isn’t that typical, says Joy Lo Dico

It’s a shame that the Budget isn’t accompanied by music, as party leaders’ speeches often are. If it were, the tune blasting out of those speakers would be Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”.

The chancellor pledged that she would not let her critics “beat me” and hit out at the “misogyny” in public life and “armchair critics” in the Commons before her tax-raising Budget.

It was stirring stuff, a genuinely defiant bit of steel. She has already said that she is sick of people “mansplaining” how to be chancellor and reportedly told a business leader to “talk to me with respect – I’m the chancellor of the Exchequer” after they had robustly challenged her over the summer about tax on North Sea drilling. James Cleverley, the former home secretary, now Tory backbencher, agreed that she is “right” about misogyny in politics while discussing on Times Radio the “abuse” he has seen his female colleagues endure.

To demand respect suggests she hasn’t been given it. And what we should be asking is: why not? It is no longer big news that a woman leads a political party in the UK, but it took until 2024 for a female chancellor to be appointed. That is, arguably, a bigger deal. What’s different is that the holders of wealth remain, largely, men. And the people most affected by tax rises will also, largely, be men.

Take property ownership and the supposed mansion tax. Women own more property than men in the UK, but of lower value. For properties over £800,000, 71 per cent of mortgage applications come from men. In UK real estate, 85 per cent of C-suite leaders are men. The oil world, if possible, is even more skewed.

No wonder then, when they and their circle don’t agree with her, she gets mocked as “Rachel from accounts”. She’s right to kick back. In a recent interview with The Times, she delivered the expected criticisms of her detractors – the Tories and the media, “the boys who now write newspaper columns”, as she put it – the ones who have had to cede power to her. But she also admitted being struck by the intensity of the backlash. “I don’t think even I had realised the misogyny that still exists in public life,” said Reeves, who knows feminist territory well.

Reeves went from an all-girls school, Cator Park School for Girls, to Oxford, where she studied PPE in the late 1990s. I had a similar journey, though I was doing a rather less useful degree than hers. At an all-girls school, respect is naturally given to everyone around the table. But when we walked into the old elite universities, where legacy biases hung around, we had to earn it all over again.

The Labour Party will have shielded her on her way up through politics. Now, in the Exchequer and surrounded by the titans of business, she has met that moment again. The irony is that her qualifications to be chancellor are far superior to many of her predecessors. She was an economist at the Bank of England; Mervyn King, her former boss, still rates her, I’m told.

‘Misogyny still exists in politics in the sense that you can’t act naturally. For women to make an impact, they have to talk big’ (PA)

Misogyny still exists in politics in the sense that you can’t act naturally. For women to make an impact, they have to talk big. Margaret Thatcher famously had to train her voice to attain gravitas. More recently, Shabana Mahmood has achieved cut-through with bold, unambiguous statements on immigration – whether you agree with them or not. Kemi Badenoch, currently the Tory leader, puts on a big display of fighting but somehow crumbles at the last.

Reeves has to be hard too: adopting the swaggering language of “iron-clad” fiscal rules and securonomics (a terrible word, but better than Osborne’s “machonomics”). It can make you sound like a prat – and an easy target for the men trying to knock you off your pedestal.

But if you clearly have the entitlement to speak, and the credentials to make the call, and they still won’t listen, what are you meant to do? It strikes me as rich that one of the most powerful women in the country called out misogyny – only to be told by men everywhere that it’s nothing of the kind. Aretha knew the answer. When respect isn’t freely given, you spell it out until they can’t ignore it.