Rachel Reeves, still chancellor, possibly even to her own surprise after a tumultuous year, asked the Labour conference to: “Have faith, because our party and our country have overcome greater challenges than this.” Her plea to keep the faith was made as much to the country as to her comrades.
Yet this was not a plaintive cry, but a defiant one. Her recent trials, a fiscal baptism of fire, seem to have galvanised Ms Reeves into becoming a more confident, assertive speaker. She dealt forcefully with a heckler accusing ministers of betraying Palestine, and she made a credible case for why it is wrong to say, as she repeatedly put it, “that there’s no difference between a Labour government and a Conservative government”.
