DAN HODGES: If Rachel Reeves is Labour’s brightest star, why has she opened door for Tory fightback?

Fresh from making a brief statement that last Wednesday’s budget was simply “papering over the cracks of 13 years of economic failure”, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme. Presenter Amol Rajan read her a list of childcare measures announced in the budget. What was the Labor Party opposed to, she asked, and what would she and her party do differently?

Reeves hesitated for a minute and then admitted that he would support them all.

Rajan tried a different tactic. Labour’s education spokesperson, Bridget Phillipson, had recently given a major speech on childcare, but it contained no cost proposals. So what really was Labour’s childcare policy? Reeves hesitated again and then said, “We will lay out all of our plans as we get closer to the election.”

Rajan moved on to the topic of immigration. Did the Labor Party support more or less net migration? Reeves muttered something about apprenticeships.

What about tax thresholds? Did Labor support or oppose the Government’s policy? Reeves was evasive before insisting: ‘I have plans!’ What were those plans regarding tax thresholds, Rajan asked again. “I can’t say,” Reeves responded.

Labour’s shadow chancellor is being talked about as one of her party’s brightest stars. Chat to any of Sir Keir Starmer’s team and they will speak of her in an almost reverential tone. “Rachel is a brilliant performer,” a Starmer ally told me recently. “She is the real vice principal.”

At the moment, Reeves is not performing brilliantly. She is a pedestrian. She is overrated. And as she demonstrated last week, she is opening the door to a conservative counterattack on the economy.

Ask the Reeves cheerleaders if he’s really that cool, what he’s really done, they’ll look at you blankly. As if some kind of sacrilege had been uttered. Then they resort to the same tired list of supposed achievements.

The most important thing is Labor leadership on the economy. Voters currently rate Labor higher on economic competence, with YouGov’s tracker on the issue giving it a small, if unspectacular, six-point lead. But that represents a 17-point drop since last October. And given the economic pain unleashed by the Truss Budget, the cost of living crisis and the highest tax burden since the Second World War, it hardly represents a ringing endorsement of Labour’s own economic policy offer.

Reeves’ allies are also keen to highlight what they call his “economic reach.” One of them told me: ‘He’s been working hard to rebuild relationships with the business community, and it’s working.’ You could see it at the party conference. The suits were back.

And again it is true that the boardrooms of British corporations are opening up to Reeves and his team. But that is to be expected. The chief executives of UK plc can read opinion polls as well as anyone else. They recognize that the 44-year-old former Bank of England economist is on course for 11th place and are making the appropriate ingratiating noises.

But apart from being showered with warm words, they are as unaware of the details of Labour’s economic strategy as the rest of the country. Another success cited by Reeves’ admirers is the claim that she beat the Government on the windfall tax for energy companies. “That was Rachel’s whole strategy,” a Shadow Cabinet colleague told me. “This tied Boris Johnson, and then Truss, in a knot. “It was one of our biggest victories.”

But it wasn’t Rachel Reeves’ strategy. She was Gordon Brown’s. The idea of ​​using a windfall tax on blue-chip speculators to draw a political dividing line between Labor and the Conservatives was first mooted in the mid-1990s. And the fact that Reeves has to take ownership of it almost 30 years later is telling.

The Labor Party likes to claim that its economic policy gap is the product of tactical ingenuity. “We’re not going to give the Conservatives any easy targets,” said one adviser. “We’re going to keep our powder dry until the time is right.”

But Reeves’ gunpowder is becoming so dry that it is in danger of flying into the air.

By the equivalent stage of the 1990s election cycle, Gordon Brown had taken control of the economic debate with a series of bold policy initiatives. An unexpected tax. A national minimum wage. Public-Private Partnerships. The social welfare program for work.

What does Rachel Reeves offer? A National Economic Council. A modern industrial strategy. An abstract ambition for Britain to somehow have the highest sustained growth in the G7.

Even the only major plan he has announced – his staggeringly expensive £28bn green industrial revolution – is being watered down, and Reeves now says it will be subordinated to his fiscal and debt-reduction rules.

Labor strategists believe they are minimizing the opportunities for the Tory attack machine to come back to life. But it is quite the opposite.

For the first time since Boris Johnson became embroiled in the Partygate farrago, Conservative officials believe they may have identified a route to victory. With the economy acting as your compass.

“Labour’s economic strategy is baffling,” a senior Tory adviser told me. “It’s just a bunch of vague nonsense.” There is no coherent plan. The biggest growth in the G7? Well great, we all want that! The question they must answer is how they are going to achieve it.”

Ask any shadow minister that question and you will be met with blank stares. The reality is that Reeves is not trying to win the economic debate. Instead, he sits back and waits for Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak to lose control.

But that’s no longer the safe bet it was when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were setting the economy on fire. Although he didn’t get the political juices pumping, Hunt successfully got the budget out of him.

“Given the limited room to play – and the limited amount of money available – it worked out well,” said a Treasury ally. ‘We know people wanted us to do more, especially on tax cuts. But we will get there. This has laid the foundation.”

Meanwhile, Labor is getting nervous about the way dire growth predictions for 2023 are slowly being revised upwards. The day before the budget, Reeves distributed an advert saying: “Under the Conservatives, the UK is the only G7 country with negative growth this year”. It was a completely false claim based on an outdated forecast from the International Monetary Fund. But he was illustrative of how concerned the Shadow Chancellor is about manipulating the economic narrative, rather than trusting the facts.

Ministers also believe Reeves has fallen into a trap by pledging to reverse the removal of the £1m tax-free lifetime pension allowance. One told me: ‘It’s strange. Why has the Labor Party suddenly decided to go to war with people like doctors, headteachers, air traffic controllers, senior military officers and civil servants?

For their part, Labor strategists say pension reforms are another Conservative goal, one that will allow them to once again be framed as part of the rich, rather than working families. And although the Office for Budget Responsibility has scrapped its prediction that the economy is heading towards a technical recession, its forecast of a 0.2 per cent contraction in 2023 should give Sunak and Hunt little comfort.

Any form of sustained economic contraction will have a negative (and, from the Government’s perspective, probably terminal) impact at the polls. But, for the moment, conservative spirits have been lifted. “Now we can see a path to staying in power,” one official told me, jokingly adding, “It’s a very narrow path.” But luckily Rishi and Jeremy are very skinny!’

Rachel Reeves’ job is to block that route. But at the moment she is failing. If Labour’s Shadow Chancellor really has a plan to deliver Britain the fastest growth of any major global economy, great. It’s time to share it with the rest of us.