One of the many skills politicians really need is knowing when to make a call.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen how badly that sense can go wrong when a leader thinks it’s the right time to call an election: Rishi Sunak managed to get both the timing of the 2024 election wrong, as well as the decision to stand outside in the pouring rain and announce he was calling it. Theresa May made a similar mistake, calling an election which then robbed her of her majority.
But it’s not just those big calls that can be badly timed. It’s also the calls that opposition politicians make about when to really go after someone.
You can only call for so many resignations from your opponents before that demand starts to lose its power. If you keep calling for different people to resign who also don’t quit, or who haven’t done anything bad enough to merit being sacked, then you end up sounding a little ridiculous.
square POLITICS The housing rules Rachel Reeves broke - and why she won't be sacked
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The Conservatives are risking this very situation with their claim that Rachel Reeves’s position is “untenable” after the Chancellor apologised for failing to get a “selective” licence to rent out her home in Southwark. Reeves said she had rented her house via an external lettings agency when she moved into 11 Downing Street with her family last year, and that she was “not aware” that a selective licence, costing £945, was necessary.
Reeves made the mess even more tangled by initially failing to highlight emails from her husband, which undermined her claim that the couple didn’t know they needed the licence. Though the lettings agency apologised and took responsibility for not securing it, the emails prompted a second apology to Starmer and a very grumpy reply from the Prime Minister.
When she realised, she rectified the situation and wrote to Keir Starmer to apologise. The Prime Minister consulted his independent ethics adviser, decided that no further action needed to be taken, and considers the matter closed.
There are lots of reasons why this case has political currency. Firstly, this is not the first senior member of Starmer’s Government to break housing rules: Angela Rayner’s departure earlier this autumn over her failure to pay stamp duty was the most notable.
But Rushanara Ali also left the Government in August over the way she handled rent hikes on the property she owns in east London – while serving as homelessness minister.
Given housing is one of the issues Labour has long been vocal on, you’d expect ministers to be doubly anxious about not breaking their own rules. Or to be seen to be behaving in the kind of rogue way they would criticise in others.
For there to be a third row about housing concerning another very senior member of the Government not only gives the impression of a serious lack of attention to detail – it also suggests to voters that those in power think they can correct administrative oversights scot-free while the rest of us are buried under a ton of bureaucratic bricks if we make the same mistakes.
But none of that necessarily means that Reeves should be sacked, or that the Conservatives have made the right call in demanding that she go.
Their demands currently seem overblown and focused on the wrong thing. Most voters will surely be far more irritated that the Chancellor appears to be about to break her party’s manifesto pledge not to put up income tax, VAT or national insurance when she unveils the Budget.
Taken together, the failure to get the licence and the potential broken promise make Reeves appear as though she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But the former should only be a backdrop to the latter.
Voters both hate and expect broken promises from politicians. They tend to see these failures as proof for the politically toxic idea that MPs are living the high life while making everyone else’s life more difficult. That’s exactly why the 2009 expenses scandal was so potent, especially as it came hot on the heels of the financial crisis.
But the catalyst for that anger is always the policy failure that is affecting ordinary people, rather than the administrative oversight of a politician failing to fill out a form when moving house.
Many of us find such admin difficult and easy to overlook or forget the details of when we’re busy. But we are less forgiving when our own lives are made more difficult by tax hikes or – thanks to the national insurance hike for employers in last year’s Budget – by fewer jobs being available.
Focusing on the manifesto would also tie Reeves more closely to Starmer. He is a stickler for detail, but it is hard to pin a missing landlord licence on the Prime Minister. It is, however, entirely his responsibility to make promises to the electorate that he can keep and then to abide by them.
Whether Reeves remains Chancellor for the next 20 years or whether her days are numbered is less relevant than the reality that Starmer is the First Lord of the Treasury, and that as Labour leader, he sold both his party’s economic policies and Reeves’s credentials to voters in the election last year. Perhaps he made the wrong call back then on both personnel and promises. But the Tories are making the wrong call on how to attack him and his party now.
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