The money flows nicely into the Reeves household. She earns £91,000 as a Labour MP and another £67,000 for her duties as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Husband Nick Joicey is doing equally well. A leading civil servant, he’s on £170,000. Between them, that’s a handy £328,000.
The reason I delve in their family finances is not because I’m hostile to big earners (in fact, the very reverse) but to show that Rachel Reeves had plenty of money to personally pay for pop concert tickets – but chose instead to take them as freebies.
That is wholly unacceptable and made worse by the fact that she knows that on Wednesday her mini-Budget will put thousands out of work making them incapable of affording those kind of tickets ever again.
Yesterday everything was going nicely for Ms Reeves. Then, in one of those patsy television interviews Cabinet Ministers take on Sunday morning, she was unexpectedly asked if she had paid for the O2 tickets this month for her and a member of her family to see the pop star Sabrina Carpenter (don’t worry I hadn’t heard of her either).
Those tickets cost £600. She definitely has the moolah to pay for them, but defended taking the VIP tickets on security grounds. That is b****cks.
Why didn't Rachel Reeves pay for her own £600 tickets? It's time for her to go - Kelvin MacKenzie
GB News/Getty Images
I presume that she and her family were given a box to allow her security detail to be alongside her. The reality is that you must have security if you are the Chancellor but that comes for free, supplied by the government through the taxpayer, what isn’t free are the tickets.
There will have been a number of mothers in that audience who will be lucky to earn one third of what Ms Reeves makes but will have scrimped and saved to afford the tickets for themselves and their kids. Why couldn’t Reeves have done the same?
She must have guessed that taking freebies in this difficult financial moment for the nation would cause a row. After all she has history in this area.
Following the Election (I wish we the voter had known BEFORE the Election) it was revealed that Ms Reeves had taken £7,500 in outfits so she would look her best on the hustings. When the inevitable storm exploded she gave an undertaking never to take free clothes again.
Note she didn’t give the same undertaking about free tickets. A cunning ruse.
It wouldn’t surprise me that because of the fury her freebie will cause both among colleagues and voters that she will be ordered by Starmer to pay the £600 herself. But the damage will be done.
The suggestion in the Sunday papers was that she’s on borrowed time – a bit like the UK’s borrowed money. Unless the economy improves, she will go sometime after the November Budget. These free tickets will have hurried her exit.
Keir Starmer must fire Rachel Reeves for her poor financial judgement and greed.
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What on earth is wrong with our politicians? They seem to forget that they were skint once and there is nothing worse than seeking a politician with his/her head down in the trough while you the voter struggles.
Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, indicated Reeves was on her own when she said on Times Radio that she hadn’t taken freebies since becoming an MP "partly because I’ve been very, very busy."
Mind you she didn’t say that she hadn’t taken freebies when working as London’s Deputy Mayor for Transport from 2018-2021. Perhaps the Times might take a look at that. Or am I being too cynical?
I imagine Wednesday’s financial statement will be a nightmare. If the briefings are anything to go by there will wholesale cuts in Department budgets meaning tens of thousands of jobs to go and the warning that if things don’t cheer up there will be tax rises in the November budget.
Napoleon said give me lucky generals. Labour, including Starmer, are greedy generals. Reeves should go. Her financial judgment is poor and her greed is unacceptable.
