The official published version of Rachel Reeves's Spring Statement this year contains a proud pledge: 'We promised change at the election.'

Except that's not what the Chancellor actually said when she delivered the speech this month. 

In a telling Freudian slip, Reeves stumbled over her words, saying instead: 'The promise we changed.' 

The gaffe was discreetly edited from Hansard's official record of parliamentary proceedings.

The error neatly captures how much is going wrong with her chancellorship. 

After 20 months in the job, Reeves, one of the most unpopular Chancellors in history, is still breaking promises.

For this article, I have spoken to ministers, former ministers, multiple MPs and several party advisers. 

All paint a picture of a Chancellor entirely out of her depth, with zero political intuition and facing a host of problems on the political and – as I shall reveal – personal fronts, many of them self-inflicted.

In a Cabinet low on heavy hitters, Reeves, 47, is one of the weakest of all, despite her exalted position. 

Her public performances are wooden, her grasp of detail questionable, her reputation with Labour MPs shot to pieces after a string of policy mishaps.

In No 10, officials once talked of Sir Keir Starmer and Reeves being 'joined at the hip'. No longer.

Senior ministers now privately joke that Starmer has taken to asking whether his Chancellor will be attending the same receptions as him.

If she is, they say, he arrives 20 minutes later, so that she is first to face the anger of Labour MPs over the calamitous performance of the Government.

The story may or may not be apocryphal, but the fact that more than one minister repeated it to me confirms the unravelling of the relationship between the PM and his Chancellor. 

(Her supporters insist to me they meet 'regularly', one-on-one, either in her study in No 11 or his office in No 10 for a cosy chat, often over a glass of red wine.)

One economic adviser close to Reeves tells me: 'They're like two ex-lovers strapped together on a desert island. They can't stand each other, but have nowhere else to go. 

'They're not friends, there's no warmth, yet Starmer needs her as his lightning conductor. She's the only one in government more unpopular than him.'

The latest LabourList popularity contest among party members underlines this point. 

The Chancellor has slumped to a truly dire minus 6 per cent, compared with a feeble 3 per cent approval rating for Starmer. (Remember, this is within the party.) 

Yet Energy Secretary Ed Miliband – whose mad dash to Net Zero is beloved by the grassroots – has a mighty 70 per cent.

Many Labour MPs privately despair that Reeves appears incapable of raising her game. 

In the 'attention economy', where presentation counts for everything, her rhetoric is often confused when the Government's economic message needs clarity.

Nor is she known for being much fun. One MP told me: 'In public she is deadly serious. Robotic.' 

She sounds, says another critic, 'like a cross between a Dalek and a claims assessor trying to explain why fire insurance doesn't cover a blaze that has destroyed a claimant's house'.

Few have noticed that, when delivering speeches, a hesitant Reeves prefers a large typescript – which she follows slowly with her finger – rather than attempting to wrestle with an autocue or teleprompter.

Several Labour MPs, I can reveal, have recently urged her to undergo voice training because, they say, in private she's more relaxed, with an infectious laugh that you can hear from one end of a train to the other. 

'She is likeable, funny, but freezes in public,' says a further Labour insider.

'Politics is about performance – and she can't perform in public.'

While Reeves seems incapable of improving her speeches, I can reveal she does now enjoy the services of a professional make-up artist, who arrives in Downing Street before big set-piece occasions. 

If the event is in the early evening, she likes being primped and pampered while sipping a glass of wine.

She is highly concerned about her appearance, according to one Whitehall veteran. 

'If there are cameras around when she's leaving No 11, or at a summit, she always poses for them,' they say. 

'She's shameless.'

For all that, the Chancellor is increasingly socially awkward in public and others say she struggles more and more with small talk. 

Her eyes often dart nervously from side to side. Her smile is slow to arrive and frequently uncomfortable when it does. She also recites party slogans – 'If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it' – like mantras.

She is also hyper-sensitive to criticism – as one highly revealing episode crystallises.

At a genteel 'meet and greet' over tea and sandwiches with local business leaders in Aberdeenshire last year, the Chancellor was robustly challenged – she believes rudely – over her punitive taxes on North Sea drilling.

In the middle of the conversation, the mood shifted. 'Talk to me with respect,' Reeves snapped, glaring at her interlocutor. 

'I'm the Chancellor of the Exchequer.'

Reeves is well-known to be a disciple of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's longstanding Chancellor. 

His poster was on her wall at Oxford and her former idol, now 75, regularly visits her in the Treasury. 

What's more surprising is that, I'm told, she also talks regularly to the 'wet' Tory Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor under both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

'Hunt sees her alone in her office in No 11. They speak a lot,' reveals one source.

In recent weeks, deteriorating relations with Starmer have only made her more isolated within the Government and her own party.

Her rift with her boss was horribly exposed in January when Reeves was suddenly dropped from Starmer's supine delegation to Beijing to meet China's President Xi. 

In a late change, a junior Treasury minister, Lucy Rigby, travelled in the Chancellor's place on a trip optimistically described by Starmer as 'history-making'.

A trusted senior source tells me: 'Rachel was humiliated.'

But in truth, these strains existed well before the China trip, having been worsened at her second tax-raising Budget last November. 

Ahead of Reeves's speech, Robert Peston, the political editor of ITV and himself the son of a Labour peer, observed acidly that in 35 years covering Budgets he had 'never known such a shambolic build-up'.

Reeves, you will remember, believing that Starmer would back her, had repeatedly suggested income tax would rise by 2 per cent – in a clear breach of Labour's manifesto.

After explosive public fury, she soon backed down. Insiders suggest this was the moment that relations between her and Starmer slumped to their lowest and perhaps-irrecoverable point.

Politics can be a lonely business at the best of times. And, I am sorry to report, the Chancellor's family has faced huge upheaval in recent months. 

In January 2025, her husband Nick Joicey, 55, the second permanent secretary to the Department of Environment, took a one-year secondment to be interim chief operating officer of Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government.

Labour sources briefed that he wanted to give his wife more 'airspace'. 

But I can disclose that Joicey is staying in Oxford for longer than initially planned, which means he barely sees his family during the week.

'He's still on secondment,' says a trusted insider. Another source adds: 'He's there for the foreseeable future.' 

One of Reeves's closest female associates tells me: 'It is tough, but they are really struggling. He's got a huge job. She's got an even bigger job. He had to play second fiddle.'

In fact, her husband of 14 years has hardly been seen in Downing Street this year.

When Labour won the election, the couple and their daughter, born in 2012, and son, born in 2015, left their four-bedroom family home in leafy Dulwich, South London, for the flat above 10 Downing Street.

(Since 1997, most Prime Ministers have preferred to live in the No 11 flat, which is larger than the one above No 10.)

In another highly publicised embarrassment for the woman charged with stewarding the nation's finances, it later transpired that Reeves and Joicey had failed to secure the correct local authority licence when they rented out their family home for about £3,200 a month. 

Joicey, perhaps wisely for his wife's career, took most of the blame.

One former MP who knows Reeves well says: 'With Nick still in Oxford, she operates like a single mother in the week, which adds to the strain.'

Another friend of the Chancellor says she has to work hard to fit her ministerial duties around the children: 'Nothing is fixed in stone as she tries to do the school drop-off when she can.'

Joicey did, however, rush back from Oxford to be by her side after the infamous moment last July when Reeves openly cried on the frontbenches of the Commons – while Starmer, strangely oblivious, sat next to her.

It was the day after the Government had been forced into yet another U-turn over £5billion of welfare cuts and, as she left the chamber, still visibly upset, the Chancellor's sister Ellie, a Labour MP and Solicitor General, made sure to stay alongside her for moral support.

When Ellie speaks in the chamber, her own husband John Cryer – a former MP, now in the House of Lords – is invariably seen in the peers' gallery supporting her. 

Joicey is conspicuously absent when Reeves is on her feet.

As Chancellor she often brings home-cooked lunches in Tupperware into the Treasury, but she may have more time to kill after the May local elections, when her allies fear she is likely to be scapegoated by Starmer for what are widely expected to be disastrous losses for Labour.

Her standing in the public's eye has arguably never recovered since she axed the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners back in July 2024.

Despite the screeching U-turn that followed, one senior Labour source told me: 'She will never be forgiven for that.'

Reeves had failed to consult her Cabinet colleagues before making the initial announcement, which was not in Labour's manifesto.

But no one should have been surprised: when she had the shadow work and pensions brief in Opposition under Energy Secretary Ed Miliband's Labour leadership, she argued for means-testing the benefit.

A minister said: 'It's her policy, just like taxing small family farms. The first [Environment Secretary] Steve Reed knew about that was 24 hours before the Budget. What was she thinking? Not about him, that's for sure.

'Most of our policy failures have flowed from the Treasury.'

But the policy of which Reeves is most proud is the 20 per cent VAT hike on private schools. 

The daughter of Graham and Sally, two state-school headteachers, she has a chip on her shoulder about independent education.

'She went to a ropey south London comprehensive and judges harshly people who send their children to private schools,' says one Labour source. 'She's got a real hang-up about it.'

(Intriguingly, Sally is an avid Daily Mail reader but hides her copy if her daughter visits.)

Not that the Chancellor's political views get in the way of her enjoying the luxuries of public office.

Her stock slumped further last year after she accepted tickets worth £600 for a Sabrina Carpenter concert at the O2, months after Starmer had been embarrassed into repaying thousands of pounds of free Taylor Swift concert tickets.

Reeves tried to justify her choice by saying: 'I now have security, so I can't just sit with normal tickets at a pop concert. I was advised that I should be in a box.' 

Critics wondered why she couldn't have purchased the tickets herself on her salary of £174,000.

The Chancellor has also been criticised for accepting designer clothes worth £7,500 from Labour donor Juliet Rosenfeld at the last election. 

She compounded the error by wearing one of the freebie outfits for her keynote speech at the Labour conference.

One party adviser said: 'Rachel thought she could get away with it and wanted to look her best, so wore it and thought 'to hell with the consequences'. It was a lapse in judgment – and not the last, I'm afraid.'

In the last month, Reeves has suffered yet another blow with the resignation of her political director Matt Pound. 

He was a stalwart of pressure group Labour Together, which helped Starmer win the leadership in 2019.

Last month, the group's former head, Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons, resigned after it emerged he had commissioned – Stasi-style – a £36,000 Labour Together report into the background of two journalists who had revealed the organisation breached election law by not disclosing £730,000 of donations.

Officially, Pound's departure was 'mutually agreed'. But Reeves's tribute to him was gushing, saying his role 'in transforming the Labour Party and securing a historic general election win was nothing short of pivotal'.

A serving ministerial adviser told me: 'Matt is one of the most talented operators in Westminster. He is brilliant and has kept the entire show on the road.

'But he was too close to [ousted Starmer adviser] Morgan McSweeney so Rachel lost him.' 

I can disclose that, since 2022, Reeves has taken £110,000 for 'political campaigning' from Labour Together – £33,000 of which was accepted after the think-tank commissioned the 'smear' on the journalists.

No other Labour MP has taken so much money from the group.

Though I'm told Reeves did not know about the £36,000 report when she took the money, Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake told me: 'The money is tainted and should be given back.'

Notoriously, Reeves has been found again and again to have given false statements about her career before arriving in Parliament.

That includes her claiming to be an 'economist' at the banking giant HBOS, when she was actually employed in customer services, to boasting she had spent 'a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England (BoE)', when in fact, she spent just five years and seven months there.

Her 2023 book The Women Who Made Modern Economics was famously revealed to contain large plagiarised sections. They came from several sources including Wikipedia and her Labour colleague Hilary Benn.

'Every time there has been an issue with her CV it's been her 'unnamed officials' who are to blame,' says a former shadow minister.

'It's everyone's fault except Rachel's. Pull the other one!'

Now even once-loyal colleagues admit she embodies the peril of over-promoting.

One former ministerial adviser says: 'She is rightly proud of being the first woman Chancellor and Keir was determined to give her the job. We all thought she was the right person.

'But many of us now know this was an appointment about inclusivity and "optics".'

And yet, despite her low standing among colleagues, she was invited to Chequers two weeks ago with other Labour MPs, as part of the latest charm offensive by Starmer.

'She was in surprisingly good spirits,' claims one MP. 

'That's because, despite everything, she feels safe in her job as long as Keir is there. He's lashed himself to her mast. They need each other.'

Which means, of course, that if the PM is sunk after the May elections, she'll go down with the ship, too.