Reeves’s sob stories about ‘sexism’ are getting taxing now

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves claims she has finally identified the source of her sweeping unpopularity. Not her tax hikes, her cuts to winter-fuel payments or the stagnant economy, but something far more straightforward. Apparently, it’s all down to good old-fashioned sexism.

‘I’m sick of people mansplaining how to be chancellor to me’, Reeves told The Times last week. When asked specifically about being referred to as ‘Rachel from Accounts’ in the papers, she went on to say: ‘I recognise that I’ve got a target on me… They’re going for me all the time. It’s exhausting.’

Yes, no doubt it can be exhausting to be chancellor. Being in charge of the UK economy is a pretty important job, after all. Since entering the Treasury, there has been no shortage of grumbling about Reeves’s performance. And justifiably so, given her appalling record.

What is most telling is how surprised Reeves seems to be by the public’s dissatisfaction – almost as if she had expected her position as the ‘first female chancellor’ to afford her immunity from criticism.

Of course, the idea that she has a special ‘target on her back’ is simply unfounded. One wonders where she was when her male predecessors were getting it far worse. Kwasi Kwarteng was practically obliterated by the media throughout his disastrous 38-day tenure. George Osborne was portrayed in countless editorial cartoons as a ghoulish public-school sociopath. He was even booed at public events. Suffice to say, Reeves is not special.

The chancellor may believe she is subjected to constant condescension, but she is just as keen to dish it out herself. Earlier this year, at a sandwiches-and-tea ‘meet and greet’ with local business leaders in Scotland, one attendee dared to challenge her on her punitive taxes on North Sea drilling. ‘Talk to me with respect’, Reeves reportedly shot back haughtily, ‘I am the chancellor of the exchequer’. Apparently, Reeves ‘enjoyed’ this moment. ‘He deserved it’, she said of the rebuke. ‘He wouldn’t have spoken like that to George Osborne or Gordon Brown.’

If that was Reeves in ‘girl boss’ mode, her sob-story schtick is perhaps even more taxing. The old wound she likes to repeat is that she’s been ‘underestimated [her] whole life’. ‘They did when I was at school, they did when I played in those chess tournaments as a girl’, she told Channel 4 last month, in a segment that felt oddly reminiscent of a pre-audition clip for The X Factor. ‘I’m going to… prove to everyone that a woman from an ordinary background – and a woman – can do this job’, she said.

When Reeves told the Channel 4 interviewer that she has always felt she had ‘something to prove’, she was momentarily blindsided when the interviewer cut in: ‘Have you proved it?’ ‘Well, I’m still… yeah, I’m still doing that’, she trailed off. Indeed, if Reeves still feels she has ‘something to prove’ as chancellor, it’s surely because she does.

In truth, if anyone is reducing Reeves to her sex, it’s herself. While misogynists certainly exist among us, the fact that the public is unhappy with Reeves (including the female half) has little to do with her being a woman, and a lot to do with the lack of positive results she has managed to produce.

In her achingly self-pitying Times profile, Reeves highlights that there’s still a ‘lack of confidence in young women and girls’. That they don’t always believe they can strive. One has to wonder how inspiring Reeves’s whole ‘stop scrutinising me, I’m a woman and I’m trying’ routine really is to a girl who might one day like to venture into politics. Indeed, denouncing criticism as ‘mansplaining’ while simultaneously holding one of the most powerful offices in the country doesn’t sound like ‘girl power’ to me. It sounds more like entitlement.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.