Sabrina Carpenter’s show at the O2 was enjoyed by Rachel Reeves – for free

WHEN Rachel Reeves became the chancellor of the exchequer, the Labour machine reminded anybody who would listen that this was the first female politician appointed to the role.

Despite never choosing a woman to be its actual leader – the Tories are currently on their fourth – the Labour robocops ordered its MPs and members to react like the last lock on the patriarchal shackles at parliament had finally been shattered.

It means the Labour Party will now have a very difficult job in trying to shuffle her
out of the position, the optics they programmed for her first speech as a history-maker would be played out in reverse if Sir Keir Starmer is encouraged to see that a change of personnel would be wise.

One or two Labour MPs were coming to the same conclusion this week that rapping the word “growth” at struggling people – who will struggle even more with winter fuel payment cuts, disability cuts, NHS cuts and forthcoming cuts to public services – is not playing out as planned in the Labour policy lab.

Harrington has suggested before that Labour councillors seeing elections coming over the horizon – and Westminster City Council is now there to hold rather than gain – might be feeling a little uncomfortable about defending their national counterparts on the doorstep. The party’s foot soldiers in local government have so far been rather let down.

It’s all a world away from the euphoria which came with beating the dead-already Tories at the general election last July.

This week the normally loyal Daily Mirror bashed out a front-page photo of Reeves issuing her painful spring statement next to the stark headline: “Balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”

Rachel Reeves

We can argue about her strategies on economics all day (pssst it sounds like “trickle-down”) but outside of the Treasury buildings she seems unable to know when a room is in need of reading.

People say she is scrutinised more because she is a woman and the “Rachel from Accounts” label is about as funny as watching the “The Inbetweeners do Oasis” sketch on Comic Relief.

But surely anybody who has to fix their own LinkedIn CV so it’s more reflective about her career in banking, or releases a book on women in politics with paragraphs scalpeled from Wikipedia, is cooking up their own problems, regardless of gender.

And certainly any sensible politician of her standing would know when not to gobble up the freebies to see Sabrina Carpenter at the O2 last month, so soon as it was after the last ticket fuss.

She was gifted a £600 private box package and it didn’t help matters when she told the BBC that they were tickets that couldn’t be bought by the public. This was due to security but it just made it sound even more exclusive for her.

As it happens, Harrington has sympathy for the flawed human beings who run our country needing down time, and claps the notion that some quarters of the press get angrier than they should over the issue of complimentary tickets, especially when compared to their less vexed view of, say, the state of social housing, the normality of food banks, unstoppable phone thefts or unresolved foreign wars.

But this is the world she inhabits and Reeves had just seen the cleverly concocted fuss about Labour bods enjoying the perfect view too much from the hospitality suites at Taylor Swift’s Wembley tour date.

It’s almost impossible to conceive somebody in her role would think this was a good time to kick it all up again just for one night at a Sabrina Carpenter concert.

What did she think her opponents would do? Spoiler: they did exactly what they did the last time and pushed the image of a stubbornly arrogant set of frontbenchers who are enjoying being famous now they are “in” and the offers of nice things that come with it.

Reeves of course openly files all her gifts on the record.

But, while most of us pay for a night out with a hangover, she paid with the worse prospect of four completely avoidable days of questions about whether she’s the new Queen of Freeba – just as she was about to deliver the sting of the PIP cuts in the Commons.

The two are unconnected, of course, but those optics have been awful yet again.