If the candidate had recklessly run up a £4,000 debt they couldn’t repay, would you put them in charge of a £2.7trillion economy? That would be a clear red flag for me.
Now let’s say you wanted a Chancellor to restore financial responsibility to a land that’s living beyond its means. Would you pick someone who blagged freebies from friends to buy clothes?
Or was under investigation for fiddling expenses at a previous employer?
And if you ran their CV through a fact checker and it started flashing red, what would you do then?
You’d show them the door.
Yet Rachel Reeves did all those things and got the job anyway. With predictable consequences.
She’s cavalier with her own cash, and even more cavalier with other people’s. And if the facts don’t fit, no problem. She’ll massage them. Just like she did with her CV.
This is the woman in charge of the nation’s accounts at a perilous time. Someone who called herself an economist, but wasn’t.
And it shows.
Reeves killed growth and jobs by hitting businesses with £40billion of taxes in the October budget.
She’s put the country on a financial knife edge by borrowing another £30billion at the highest rates of interest this Millennium.
Of course she did.
This is an elected representative who’d had her Parliamentary credit card seized. Who claimed she struggled to balance her household budget despite a combined income of more than £250,000 a year.
As growth collapses and borrowing costs soar, Reeves has now broken her own supposedly “iron-clad” fiscal rule and must slash state spending.
Of course she broke it.
Reeves doesn’t respect the rules of basic money management and basic CV writing. So we shouldn’t be surprised that she can’t stick to her own fiscal rules.
There’s another problem.
How can a freebie-loving Chancellor muster the moral credibility to enforce yet more austerity on the rest of us? She can’t.
Not now that she’s been accused of spending hundreds of pounds on handbags, perfume, earrings and wine for colleagues, and billing them to her employer.
Reeves faces a desperate battle to assure the bond markets that she’s good for the £300billion she plans to borrow this year.
A quick glance at her CV shows she isn’t.
In any other job, she’d be gone. But PM Keir Starmer won’t get rid of her. That’s because it was his mistake to appoint this unqualified candidate in the first place.
Now here she is, running HM Treasury, banging on about “growth” while her policies destroy it at every turn.
Claiming to be pro-business while crushing the economy with taxes and throwing bungs at public sector unions.
Or preaching “stability” as the national debt balloons.
Reeves inherited an economic mess after 14 years of Tory mismanagement. But she’s the last person to put that right. And we’re paying for every mistake she makes.
