Who had the worst time at Prime Minister’s Questions this week? The obvious answer is Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who sat behind Keir Starmer with tears rolling down her face, looking — as Kemi Badenoch pointed out, not exactly sympathetically — “miserable”. Badenoch aside, it would take a truly bitter partisan not to feel some compassion for Reeves as she was forced to carry her grief in the full public glare. Her eyes were puffy, her body was protectively hunched, her mouth twitched occasionally with the effort of holding back sobs. Watching her, I wanted to reach across the screen and give her a hug.
She looked like a woman in mourning for her own professional life. The Government’s climbdown over benefits reform, in the face of opposition from its own MPs, meant that an anticipated £5 billion in savings to the Treasury would now not be materialising. Starmer bought his way out of a defeat, at the cost of landing Reeves with almost certain failure according to her own fiscal rules. (Reeves has since said that she was upset over a “personal issue” and the following day she was back on show, all smiles albeit with cold eyes.)
But back at the Dispatch Box, her boss rattled on only to hand out, not crumbs of sympathy, but the greatest humiliation: when Badenoch asked Starmer to confirm that Reeves would still be in post at the next election, the PM declined to answer, instead making a smug crack about Badenoch’s own prospects. The contrast between Reeves’s crushed demeanour and Starmer’s oblivious chortling was painful to watch.
Whatever the cause of her distress, its effects were politically consequential. The bond markets lurched in response to the footage, increasing the cost of government borrowing. Reeves’s bad day at the office was only getting bleaker. But paradoxically, the jittery traders might have saved her. Why so? Starmer responded by offering reassurance that Reeves would be Chancellor for a “very long time to come”; it seemed to cool down the markets.
So yes, the scenes on Wednesday were agonising for Reeves; and yes, she will probably be plagued by that image of her tear-streaked face for the rest of time. But ultimately, it wasn’t Reeves who was most diminished by the events in the chamber this week. We’re used to thinking of tears as the politician’s swansong (both Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May cried when their terms came to an end), but Winston Churchill famously used to blub at almost no provocation at all, and without undermining his authority.
No, the person most damaged by Reeves’s tears is not Reeves. It’s the man who carried on quipping as she cried, too invested in landing the next glib hit on the Opposition leader to consider the discomfort of the woman within touching distance. A full embrace on the front benches might have been a bit far, but he didn’t so much as catch her gaze. In this moment, Starmer looked callous. He looked heartless. He looked inhumane. And at the same time, given the neutering of the welfare bill, he looked deeply deluded.
Starmer had the opportunity this week, one year in to his devastating premiership, to establish himself definitively as a tough yet fair leader. Almost no one believes that the benefits system is working as it stands. Rebalancing it to help people out of the long-term sickness trap and back into work would be popular and morally right. It wouldn’t have been easy, but Starmer could have worked to build a consensus among his own MPs and reassure them that those who truly cannot work would receive the help they need.
Instead, the reforms were introduced in a fashion that seemed both scrappy and grand, with little effort to get backbenchers on side. Maybe he calculated that he could afford to alienate a few of his many MPs; if so, that was a bad misreading of the party’s mood. Large majorities leave a party with idle hands — and in the case of this government, won on a shockingly fragile vote share, idle hands with little to lose.
“Winston Churchill famously used to blub at almost no provocation at all, and without undermining his authority.”
Many Labour MPs think they’ll be out of their seats in four years. It’s a consideration which means the incentives for obedience are slight. Cynically, MPs who rebelled were ducking responsibility for unpopular decisions which might have cost them their constituencies. More nobly, you might say that they were freed by the collapse of their individual political ambitions to do the right thing: the Government’s own impact assessment said the reforms as originally proposed would push 250,000 people (including 50,000 children) into relative poverty.
For Starmer, though, conscious of the threat from Reform, the cruelty (or perhaps “stringency” would be a more neutral word to use) may have been the point. Operating under the mistaken belief that Reform represents a coherent political philosophy, Starmer has aligned himself more firmly with Blue Labour principles of social conservatism. But Reform is a shape-shifter, unencumbered by internal democracy or even a belief system — it can adopt whatever form is most advantageous to its flourishing.
Hence Nigel Farage’s recent pledge to remove the two-child benefits cap, despite his advocacy for the policy in the 2000s. This fits with Reform’s rising interest in natalism as an alternative to immigration; but fundamentally, its attraction for Farage is that it plays well in seats where his party has a chance of beating Labour. Now, because of the collapse of benefit reform, it seems unlikely that Starmer will be able to lift the cap himself. One failure leads ineluctably to another, and the PM has been left to take responsibility for the punitive measures of the Cameron government.
It’s worth looking, too, at the one landmark achievement of Starmer’s first year — passing the assisted dying bill, which is now almost certain to pass into law. Many MPs who supported that law did so for profound humanitarian reasons: knowing the bill has significant flaws, they wanted to limit suffering at the end of life. Yet in combination with Starmer’s attempt to enforce sweeping cuts to disability benefits, the effect is unsavoury. This looks like a government that would rather kill the vulnerable than pay to keep them alive.
Starmer, though, has presented his ruthlessness as an asset. In his interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, given after PMQs, he took the opportunity once again to talk about what a ferocious five-a-side footballer he is; how fiercely he cares about winning. This side of his personality was a helpful ballast to the rather limp implications of his hinterland as a human rights lawyer — and came in more than a little handy when Starmer was manoeuvring the hard left out of the way.
That’s the Starmer who called Jeremy Corbyn a “friend” in 2020, and expelled him from the party in 2024 (the savagery here was less in the later whacking, and more in the initial pose of amity). It’s the Starmer who, according to Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In, tried to use a loss in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election to eliminate Angela Rayner, with his team portraying her as a diva for wanting security measures after receiving death threats. (Rayner, characteristically, toughed it out.)
But the man we saw in action on Wednesday was not acting on cold political nous. He was simply cold. A man who can’t respond to anguish when it’s a foot away from him can hardly be believed to understand it when it’s happening to the distant strangers he governs.
The cruellest caricature of Left-wing politics was always the do-gooder who could only activate their sympathies in the abstract — the “telescopic philanthropy” Charles Dickens mocked in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, too busy writing letters for good causes to look after her own neglected children. Next to Reeves, Starmer was the very picture of the unfeeling liberal. In a bruising week for him, that image may well be the hardest thing to live down.
