Chancellor's snooty new deputy has set alarms ringing

IF YOU thought Rachel Reeves’s first Budget was a horror show, the upcoming sequel promises to be far more terrifying. This time around, she has a sidekick and, while our Chancellor may be hapless, her new partner in crime is chilling.

- Sam Lister

Torsten Bell has been picked to help write the new tax-and-spend plan and nothing you own or have saved is safe from his tax-grasping hands. A Treasury minister, despite only having been elected for the first time last year, he has been chosen by the Chancellor as he has one of Labour's “sharpest minds” — enough to worry any seasoned Westminster watcher.

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” as Orwell said. Apparently Bell himself is not shy about spreading the news of his giant intellect, with colleagues once cattily briefing that “he never tires of telling us how ferociously clever he is”.

Being top of the class is great if you want to be a learned professor, but politics is about understanding people.

Bell is tetchy in interviews, seemingly annoyed that jour nalists are not clever enough to understand his very clever answers. It’s not the worst offence and he’s far from the first bright spark in politics to be impatient with those they consider their inferiors.

But his interviews display a distinct lack of empathy about the impact changes have on ordinary people.