Every half-baked notion Reeves picked up in Labour brainstorming sessions collapsed the moment she tried to put them into practice.
Threatening to wallop the public with new taxes didn’t inspire a wave of national enthusiasm, for some reason.
Employers, shockingly, didn’t leap at the chance to hire more staff after the Budget made it more expensive to do so.
Millionaires didn’t hang around waiting to see how much of their fortunes Reeves could siphon off but fled on their private jets faster than you could say “wealth tax.”
The Chancellor’s doom-laden speeches about the UK economy somehow failed to kickstart growth, surprising nobody but Reeves and PM Keir Starmer.
It turned out that squeezing businesses, hammering taxpayers and scaring off investment wasn’t the path to prosperity after all.
Instead, it’s crushed ambition and enterprise.
All these things were obvious, except to Rachel Reeves. Until now.
The Chancellor has been on quite a learning curve. Unfortunately, we’re the ones paying for her education, in the shape of lower growth and higher taxes.
But there are signs she’s learning.
Slowly, steadily, she’s pulling back on her worst ideas.
Instead of more tax hikes, she’s trying to find ways to cut spending.
Instead of talking the UK down, she’s roaming foreign conferences telling anyone who’ll listen how dynamic we are really. Then holding out the begging bowl.
She’s planning to ease her tax raid on non-doms, which will cost the Treasury far more than it raises (as we warned last year).
It’s too little too late, of course. The damage has been done.
Rachel Reeves is in a hole of her own making, but at least she’s stopped digging. In contrast to her cabinet colleagues.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband still refuses to acknowledge that his fanatical renewables charge is the ultimate growth destroyer and could lead to blackouts too.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner hasn’t come to grip with economic realities either.
Her Employment Rights Bill will harm jobs and drive people onto benefits by loading struggling businesses with another £5billion of costs.
She couldn’t have picked a worse time, with Labour set to clobber businesses with an extra £25billion of national insurance from April.
Reeves has finally woken up to the calamity she has inflicted on the country. The rest of her party is still in dreamland.
Unless they wake up, it’s goodnight growth and goodnight Labour.
