The Right should fear Rachel Reeves more than Keir Starmer

In one of the most famous psychological experiments of the past 30 years, Harvard-educated researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons asked a group of young people, three in black T-shirts, three in white, to pass a basketball around a confined space.

Viewers of the subsequent video were told to count the number of passes silently in their heads. What more than half of them missed, almost incomprehensibly it seemed, was the person in a gorilla suit who walked through the passing game, faced the camera, beat his hands on his chest, and walked out of shot.

The Invisible Gorilla experiment was an example of the “selective attention” phenomenon. The audience is so busy concentrating on one thing, they completely miss a significant other thing that is going on right in front of them.
For the purposes of this election, Rachel Reeves is the person in the gorilla suit. If you really want to know what is going on in the game, watch her every move.

After Labour’s 14 years of opposition, the polls suggest that the party is an almost racing certainty to win on election day. Sir Keir Starmer will be prime minister and Reeves the first female chancellor of the UK. In the first 20 pages of the Labour manifesto, published last week, only one person was pictured who wasn’t the Labour leader. It was Rachel Reeves.

Despite its struggles to maintain any form of unity on the best way to fight the coming Labour tide (from “they haven’t got a plan” to “they have a socialist plan” to “they have a secret plan”), the Right has alighted on at least one salient point. Starmer has a problem with consistency and the voters know it. One senior Labour figure I spoke to last week said fears over tax rises were real amongst the public and business leaders – who also think a confetti of policy proposals will be raised and dropped with alarming regularity post-July 4.

The attack has legs precisely because Starmer’s political history is his biggest weakness – Mr Flip Flop. He says now that he did not believe Jeremy Corbyn was going to win in 2019, despite his wholehearted backing for precisely that outcome at the time. Such an answer stretches credulity.

On Europe, Labour has made a manifesto commitment that the UK “will stay out of the EU”, including the customs union and single market, thereby cutting off any return to freedom of movement. This pledge comes from the former shadow Brexit secretary, who passionately backed a second referendum.

He has promised to “reduce net migration”, but will not say by how much.

And in his rather more misty-eyed romantic moments, he calls himself a socialist. It is not absolutely clear why, given that Starmer is not advocating for the workers, via the state, to own the means of production and distribution of goods and services.

When the going gets tough, Starmer tends towards flakiness – the £28 billion green policy pledge reversal another example where delay signalled indecision at the top. The Right can smell weakness, and the more honest voices in Labour know it to be true.

Step forward Reeves – a woman flinty in the extreme and with a degree of consistency the member for Holborn and St Pancras lacks. For those worried that Starmageddon is ahead, Reeves should soothe a few brows.

She refused to serve under Corbyn, preferring to spend a number of fruitful years chairing the Business Select Committee. She was a highly reluctant backer of a second referendum, representing as she does the Leave-voting seat of Leeds West, rather than a Remain-voting seat in north London. She has studiously avoided the “socialist” tag.

If successful in the election, Labour’s economic growth plan is hers and will succeed or fail under her leadership. In a country desperate for some sort of change, Reeves believes in an industrial strategy and an active state, “Yes, In My Backyard” house and infrastructure building and closer trading relationships with the EU.

She will test to destruction Ronald Reagan’s assertion that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. The public sector tends towards bureaucracy and inefficiency and ministers towards in-fighting and ego. The Shadow Chancellor is betting the farm that she can reverse those trends.

If her plan for economic growth works (and that is an if in capital letters), then everything else follows. More money for public services, NHS and social care reform, defence, tax cuts.

It is a high stakes game. Every month Reeves will wait with nervous anticipation for the latest growth figures from The Office for National Statistics. Remain anaemic, and they are a millstone around her neck. If there is a bounce, it will show a route to prosperity millions of people are fed-up waiting for. The GDP figures will be the Chancellor’s ruthless judge and jury.

Reeves has to believe she will be successful. If the economy does grow, it might be worth taking a bet on tax thresholds being unfrozen – one route to killing off the substantial argument by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that there are £11 billion of tax increases ahead under Labour because the Conservatives have frozen thresholds and allowances, thereby dragging ever greater numbers into paying higher rates.

When I spoke to her last week, the shadow chancellor insisted repeatedly she wanted to see taxes fall for working people – and by that she means people on average incomes, not the wealthy. She would wear it as a badge of honour.

If the public finances are in any kind of better shape by her first budget in the autumn, that may well be the rabbit out of the hat.

At the manifesto launch in Manchester, Starmer admitted that Reeves, who was sitting in the front row seat nearest him on the podium, had “written all the costings” for the plans for government. This throwaway sentence signalled more than Starmer meant to convey. Nothing with a price tag moves in Labour without Reeves’ say so.

In 2019, the polling question “Who Would Make the Best Chancellor?” saw Sajid Javid with a 16 percentage point lead over John McDonnell. Reeves is now two percentage points ahead of Jeremy Hunt.

The Right has plenty of ammunition to shoot at Starmer and are already prepping their cannons for election day plus 1 his government will not deliver, economic calamity will follow and voters will be left with little more than buyers remorse.

Labour believes Reeves is the insurance policy, an Iron Chancellor people have yet to fully notice.