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By johnredwood on June 25, 2026
We learn that Rachel Reeves is to be sacked as Chancellor. That is a sensible decision. She has systematically depressed sentiment and hurt investment by talking the economy down, by overtaxing anyone and any business that wants to be positive. She has driven up unemployment and inflation. She has failed to restore lost public sector productivity, feather bedded ailing state businesses and services and allowed runaway energy and water bills.
Who should replace Rachel Reeves?
Front runner Ed Milliband would be a disaster. Doubling down on wasteful and damaging net zero capital projects, continuing with ruinously expensive fossil fuel energy thanks to sky high taxes and carbon charges, and refusing to get our own tax rich oil and gas out would continue the anti growth and anti enterprise Reeves policies. Burnham would fail to keep his promises of wider investment prosperity and growth from the day he appointed Miliband.
Untested Wes Streeting is so ambitious he has not set out and stuck with any clear view of how to grow an economy or more importantly how to control the out of control public spending of the last two years. It would be best to put him back in charge of the NHS and tell him to see through the reforms he claimed to have started before his resignation.
Yvette Cooper has some of the background and experience necessary, but her abject failure as Home Secretary to do the obvious things to smash the gangs, her number one policy objective, illustrates that she finds it very difficult to translate aims into working policies. Why take the risk again? As Foreign Secretary she has just been bag carrier to a PM who wanted to be out of the UK as much as possible, acting as his own Foreign Secretary.
Shabana Mahmood should stay as Home Secretary. She sounds the toughest of the candidates for that job and has a lot of unfinished work to do to smash the gangs and bring down legal migration further. Give her more time to see if she can translate tough talk into good outcomes.
Darren Jones is a slick media performer who has until recently done his best to speak for an ailing Prime Minister. This has not afforded him any opportunity to develop an independent view of how to improve the economy and go for growth. He has seemed more interested in the politics than in good government. His pathetic attempt to run for leader by allowing speculation to run until yesterday morning when he tried to jump aboard the Burnham bus with a half hearted endorsement of the new PM shows he does not have what it takes for a senior job.
Pat McFadden would be my choice. He has been loyal to Starmer in public whilst being an honest adviser in private about the benefits and tax disasters of Starmer/Reeves. He understands the need to curb benefit spending is a priority and sees that there have to be limits on extra and higher taxes. He would send the least damaging signal to the markets.