You’re wrong to dismiss my criticisms as ‘mansplaining’, chancellor (and, yes, I am a man)

Rachel Reeves is rightly proud of being the first female chancellor of the Exchequer, and often speaks of being underestimated and having to prove herself to those “boys who write newspaper columns”.

But she has proven herself now – so it strikes an odd note for her to accuse her critics of “mansplaining”, as if it is only male commentators who disagree with some of her policies.

What people want to hear on the eve of a controversial Budget is why she is making the decisions she is, rather than complaints about how the world is unfair to her.

That is why her outburst – in a sympathetic profile of her in The Times by Tom Baldwin, a Labour loyalist who has also written a positive biography of Keir Starmer – was unwise.

“I’m sick of people mansplaining how to be chancellor to me,” she said to Baldwin, “with some force”. It sounded like a complaint, even though in another part of the interview she said: “Nobody really wants to hear me complaining about stuff. What they want to know is, how are you going to play the cards you’ve been dealt?”

But that was about the Office for Budget Responsibility’s decision to downgrade its estimates of the productivity of the British economy. “You can validly ask why they didn’t do this before the general election or even last summer, so we could start with a clean slate,” she said, adroitly complaining about the OBR’s decision while saying that nobody wants to hear her complaining.

There is, though, a combativeness about the chancellor that occasionally trips into high-handedness. The Financial Times yesterday reported that, on a visit to the remote St Fergus North Sea gas terminal in Scotland in the summer, she reacted to criticism of oil and gas policy from a group of local business people by saying: “Talk to me with respect.” As eyes shifted “nervously towards the floor”, according to the FT, she said: “I’m the chancellor of the Exchequer.”

She explained afterwards that her questioner was rude, and that “he wouldn’t have spoken like that to George Osborne or Gordon Brown”. But male politicians have to put up with rudeness, too, and respect has to be earned rather than demanded.

Of course, some of the insults thrown at Reeves are sexist. “Rachel from Accounts” or “Rachel from Complaints” are contemptible epithets that diminish their authors. And the right response is for her to get on with the job.

Most of the time, the chancellor seems to understand this. When she told Baldwin that “people don’t want to read about... what really made me cry”, he interrupted and said that, unfortunately, they do. “Well, they might,” she conceded. “But what they really want to know is that they can trust me with their money, to run the economy. I’m not a public personality. I’m not in showbusiness. I’m the chancellor.”

She may not have done a very good job of it, but she has tried, in her early-morning Downing Street speech two weeks ago, and in a series of media interviews since, to explain the thinking behind the difficult decisions that are coming in the Budget. She is absolutely right to explain why controlling debt is so important, and that taxes will have to rise again, even if people can argue at the margins about whether the growth of public spending should be restrained further or which taxes should rise.

She has made mistakes, such as saying last year that she would not be coming back this year for more tax rises, and all but announcing a rise in income tax before U-turning with days to spare before the Budget.

And she made the mistake, in using the word “mansplaining”, of appearing to take criticisms of her policies personally.

But she is right about one big thing, which is about her personally and about her ally Keir Starmer personally, too. She told the FT that the economy suffers from low growth and high debt, and it will be hard to turn around: “A different leader or a different chancellor is not going to change that reality.”