Rachel Reeves was being written off in some headlines as a “lame duck” chancellor earlier this week, after a savage bond sell-off put her at risk of breaking her fiscal rules.
The shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, had even compared Reeves’s situation – somewhat bafflingly – to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s tragic prince, while the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, claimed Labour had chosen a chancellor who wasn’t “qualified to do the job”.
