So it’s arrived at last. Budget Day.

Or ‘the late Budget day’ as it might come to be known, depending on it’s impact.

Rachel Reeves has managed to do something no Chancellor has ever managed before.

Stage the late late budget show, after a year of her first budget being a major political talking point for a whole twelve months. Yes I can remember budgets that stayed in the news for weeks but not a year.

The shadow chancellor Mel Stride, and Conservative MP Katie Lam, explain today why the Chancellor is facing such a difficult task, and why the ‘smart money’ is on her producing something that will make things worse. I suspect it will be a “delayed reaction Budget” that will produce discontent as the Red book is poured over and people work out where Reeves hid the stings. For stings there will be.

I don’t want to duplicate that, but concentrate on the Chancellor herself. Someone whose career has spanned much the same time period as mine, in the same Westminster space.

Reeves entered Government last year as the touch stone of Starmer’s Labour. Long in the homework, what Rachel thought and said carried weight in Labour. Unlike the Prime Minister – the signs were there even then – Reeves did not serve under Jeremy Corbyn but sat out four and half years on the back benches, having declined to serve in his shadow cabinet due to policy differences. She’d been highly thought of long before that by Ed Miliband, and the ‘new Labour’ old guard.

She sat amongst a group of young Labour women that included Kendall, Reynolds, McGovern, Creasy, then later Rayner, de Piero, Philips and whatever those on the right thought of them, were making their names in politics and looked to be if not the future then part of that future of the Labour party. 

Now forgive me if already at that time a bit of doubt had crept in with me. Interviewing her, as we often did, she was just a bit wooden – hell lots of politicians are so that’s not a major crime, but she was – and there was that Labour nasal thing which is absolutely inexplicable but so many of them have it, and there was something else. She’s said recently she’s always been underestimated, well back in the day when you interviewed her she came across as someone who was on a hair-trigger to assume you were underestimating her. Even when you weren’t.

Having known many politicians across the board as close friends they are, despite their best efforts sometimes to hide it, only human. They don’t love being slagged off, they want to convince you they are right and when they can’t or don’t often come up with odd convictions as to why you won’t agree because they simply can’t fathom why you wouldn’t just agree with them, but for ulterior motives, since their case was so obviously right.

The FT reported her ticking off some male executive telling him to be more respectful when talking to her as she is the Chancellor. Quite apart from dismissing why – and he may just have been a thoroughly objectionable bloke – someone in financial markets might not be happy with her it displays a hauteur born not of entitlement but self doubt.

When the first female Chancellor in our history says she’s fed up with the ‘mansplaining’ you know something’s up.

Mansplaining is a thing. It’s cringy when a clearly inexperienced, usually older, man tries to tell a professional woman with acres more experience in that field what she’s getting wrong in job. It’s not a thing if a man just disagrees with a woman.

There was a rather satisfying moment about the time when Reeves first appeared on our radar when in full view of an online audience Godfrey Bloom MEP tried to explain why Jenny Scott – BBC Daily Politics presenter – might not understand economics. He actually said out loud “look I don’t know how much you understand about economics but…”

As she gently pointed out she’d written two books about it, and had already worked for Reuters and the Bank of England before becoming economics correspondent of the BBC.

Jenny actually returned to the Bank of England after the BBC to be an adviser to Governor. Of the two I’d prefer Jenny was Chancellor.

My problem with Reeves raising ‘mansplaining’, is that by any reasonable non partisan, impartial, standards she has got difficult questions to answer about how we got into this mess. And it can’t just be one long diatribe about the Tories the Tories the Tories, and Liz Truss, oh and the Tories. Do I think she will answer those questions today? I do not. Talking about mansplaining is actually just deflecting warranted flak.

The plan, if they had one, hasn’t worked, and blaming everyone and everything else, either as sexism or tribalism is as bad as Green leader Zack Polanksi’s new tactic of self-regarding deflection “oh you all seem so obsessed with me, must be rattled”. Give me strength.

I’ll never understand why the frankly deranged Labour Comms operation still has Labour MPs pumping out “Rachel Reeves has fixed the foundations of the economy, and this is the difference a Labour Government makes” when it is quite obvious to the ordinary citizen that she hasn’t and they see that difference very differently to Labour.

So under the harshest of spotlights, after tears in the Commons, and black holes that went from Tory bashing attack line to chasms of her own making. After a relentless pursuit of growth that was stifled by their own language and actions, after promising not to come back for more in taxes, now coming back for more in new taxes. After blaming others and other circumstances they’d rubbished as factors in opposition, Rachel Reeves will brief Cabinet and then pop into Downing Street for the “red box shot” then deliver her second Budget.

This is probably the most significant budget in decades, and for all the wrong reasons.

Reeves should not underestimate how much the contents of that box could finish off the economy, the government and her if it underwhelms.

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