Two-Tear Reeves needs to man up

The House of Commons is a theatre – especially in the age of social media. Nine times out of 10, MPs make their speeches knowing that they’ll be clipped and tweeted out by aides within the hour. Prime Minister’s Questions is watched live by every news desk and many members of the public. The spectacle of Rachel Reeves crying next to the despatch box yesterday, as Keir Starmer failed to say whether she would remain in post after a backbench rebellion on welfare cuts, was a rare unscripted and unexpected moment.

Reeves this morning claimed that she was having a ‘tough day’ and that the tears were down to ‘personal issues’. Politicians aren’t machines – who knows what is going on in her private life? But such a collapse of the boundary between private and public – the actual chancellor of the exchequer bawling in the chamber – is surely worth commenting on. It tells us something about the state of politics today.

There was instant speculation as to why Reeves was in tears. Was it because Starmer had refused to expressly back her? Was it due to a rumoured bust-up between Reeves and Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle behind the scenes? As BBC political editor Chris Mason pointed out on the Today programme this morning, when politicians are dealing with something personal that they don’t want to be probed on – say, a death in the family or an illness – they usually let the press know about it, so that appropriate considerations can be made. But in this case, no one in the media knew what that personal matter might have been. Add to that her miraculous recovery – she was wheeled out this morning to talk about the NHS – and it looks stranger still.

Some are almost hailing Reeves’s tears as a welcome reminder that politicians are human too. It’s true – we all cry. But most of us know better than to do it at work. Or if we must, we at least have the decency to use the privacy of a toilet cubicle. I worry that MPs have got a little too cosy in the Palace of Westminster, treating it more like their living room than the seat of our democracy. In recent years, politicians have used the Commons to have a little cry, bounce a baby and even watch pornography.

What’s more, today’s politicians are not the most resilient bunch. Our leaders in the past knew that thick skin and ideological steel were necessary to do the job. Yet MPs now seem to melt at the first sign of adversity. They accuse each other of ‘bullying’, or threatening each other’s ‘safety’, whenever an argument gets too heated. There is a sense of entitlement to all this emoting – as if we should care more about politicians’ personal lives and feelings than their political actions.

Others have argued that we should all ease up on Reeves because she’s a woman. Weirdly, this is presented as a ‘feminist’ argument. Yet it is precisely this kind of sexist claptrap that leads some people to think women are weak and emotional, or incapable of doing what were once men’s roles. Worse, it’s what leads some men to still argue that women only turn on the waterworks for attention.

Look, we can all guess at what brought Reeves to tears. We’ve been watching this Labour government make a hames of the economy. We know she is under pressure and Starmer’s government is in chaos, announcing bad policy one day only to u-turn on it the next.

Is the main lesson from the shambles of this past week really that we need a kinder, gentler, more emotional politics? No, it’s that we desperately need our politicians to get a grip.

Ella Whelan is the author of The Case For Women’s Freedom, the latest in the Academy of Ideas’ radical pamphleteering series, Letters on Liberty.