Starmer and Reeves pull off their U-turn - where now?

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves admitted mistakes had been made during the government’s difficult first year when she addressed a private meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party PLP) after announcing her spending review. Her audience knew what she meant: her catastrophic decision on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.

- ANDREW GRICE

Reeves was more honest in private than she is in public. Even after their spectacular U-turn, she and Keir Starmer insist last July’s decision was right at the time.

In her defence, the chancellor said Labour had been out of power for 14 years and in office for one – an admission, perhaps, that ministers must learn on the job. She won a good reception at the PLP for her £113bn boost to investment projects and her framing of her review, first made in The Independent, as “Labour’s choices”.

But Reeves’s plea for Labour MPs to “get out and sell” the spending programme in their constituencies landed badly with some in her audience. On Westminster’s summer party circuit, they grumbled about a lack of salesmanship from both Reeves and Keir Starmer.

These critics have a point. Neither the prime minister nor the chancellor is a natural storyteller. They sometimes look like technocratic automatons as they prioritise the “stability” they offered after Conservative chaos over their election-winning pitch of “change”. Although the social democrat Reeves is more ideological than the arch-pragmatist Starmer, many Labour backbenchers complain she has become a prisoner of “Treasury orthodoxy”.

The double act of PM and chancellor works better when they complement each other. Tony Blair was a good communicator and Gordon Brown the brains behind New Labour’s strategy and domestic policy. The relationship between David Cameron and George Osborne was similar, and without the corrosive personal tensions between Blair and Brown.