Call out the men in white coats

Any physiognomist casting an eye over our chancellor’s face will suspect she isn’t excessively bright. Then she’ll say something, anything, and the suspicion will turn into a certainty.

Yet so far no psychiatrist I know of has diagnosed Rachel Reeves with schizophrenia. That oversight ought to be corrected, and soon, before she hurts any more people.

Schizophrenia, as you know, is characterised by a delusional divorce from reality. And one doesn’t have to be a trained shrink to see that poor Rachel from Complaints has that condition, if only perhaps in a mild form.

(Rachel acquired that nickname when saying on her CV that she had been a top economist at the Bank of Scotland, and she justified that job experience by being economical with the truth. In fact, she had worked in the complaints department of a retail bank, fobbing off distraught customers who asked for a higher overdraft limit.)

But judge for yourself. This is how Rachel describes her experience of travelling through China on a recent trip: “I went on this train from Beijing to Shanghai, it’s 1,200km, it got there in four hours. Can you imagine if I’d said to the vice-premier, ‘I would like to understand what you did around environmental rules’? … We would have sounded like lunatics. We can’t get stuff done in Britain because of these ridiculous rules.”

I agree. Every sensible Briton knows that “these ridiculous rules” are hammering nails into the coffin of the economy. And every such individual is well within his rights to complain – in fact it’s his civic duty to do so. Provided, of course, that it’s not he who is responsible for suffocating the economy with a suicidal commitment to net zero.

Rachel, by contrast, is one of those directly responsible, holding as she does the second-highest position in a government whose climate fanaticism is unmatched anywhere in the world. So which of those “ridiculous rules” is she planning to rescind?

She seems to have this schizophrenic ability to become in her mind someone she isn’t in reality, in this case someone outside the government looking in. From that vantage point, one she shares with all of us, she can, indeed should, criticise our useless government to her heart’s content.

Now, I don’t know what the therapeutic protocol is for dealing with delusions, and I’d welcome any advice from medically trained readers.

Are you supposed to get the patient in touch with reality by, for example, telling Kevin that he isn’t Napoleon and should take that silly hat off, Jane that she isn’t Lady Godiva and should put her clothes on, and Rachel that she isn’t an outsider to this government and should either get rid of those ridiculous rules or shut up? Do tell me.

Everything about Rachel is progressive, including, by the looks of it, her schizophrenia. Speaking at Davos, she said:  “We’re all sick of Britain being in the slow lane, whether it’s British CEOs or British investors, and we want to see a revival of those animal spirits so that we can grow the economy and bring investment here.”

Rachel then channelled her inner Trump by holding the US president up as an example of someone whose can-do attitude is working wonders in America. “I think we do need more positivity,” she said.

The reality is that whatever economic success Trump may be able to achieve will be due not so much to what he is (a positive thinker) as to what he isn’t (a Marxist ideologue). Rachel is just that, yet she scolds British investors and businessmen for being pessimistic as if she had nothing to do with fostering such sentiments.

Her abrupt about-face on Trump is also nothing short of insane.

For the past decade or so, the Labour brass (including Reeves) have been demonising him as a racist, fascist and in general the devil incarnate. Now they desperately need a trade deal with the US, they want Britons to become as positive as Trump – to a point that they don’t notice that their catastrophically incompetent government is destroying their country in the service of an evil ideology.

I’ve already mentioned the net zero madness, all those rules Rachel finds ridiculous but does all she can to multiply. But that’s only a start. Correctly sensing that climate fanaticism alone may not destroy the economy beyond recovery, our heroine has slapped such extortionist taxes and strangulating regulations on the economy that she started a massive exodus of wealth.

One wealth-producer is leaving Britain every 45 minutes, doubtless to the resounding chorus of “good riddance” performed by our governing Marxists. Hundreds of businesses are closing down, and those that are still holding on by their fingertips are laying people off.

Supermarket chains lead the way, with Sainsbury’s announcing 3,000 redundancies and Morrison’s not far behind. And investors, both foreign and domestic, aren’t investing because they don’t like throwing good money after bad. As a result, public borrowing is becoming not only greater but also more expensive.

In the fine tradition of socialist governments everywhere, Rachel is robbing the Peter of the private sector to give to the Paul of public employees. These are the only people who are doing well under Labour, with record wage hikes blithely dispensed by Rachel from Complaints.

“I want to keep the talent here,” she says. “In recent years too much has been drifting overseas.” True, so it has. But at nowhere near the rate of the past six months, when she took charge of the Exchequer.

Yet Rachel’s medical condition is such that she lives in the virtual reality of her mind, not in the actual reality of life. Thus, she blames the Tories for whatever economic problems Britain is experiencing: “You can’t turn around 14 years of sluggish growth in six months,” she says.

No you can’t. But you certainly can eliminate growth altogether, which is what Rachel from Complaints has done.

Economic growth in any country is inversely proportionate to the amount of socialism in it. The Tories are socialist too, but less so than Rachel and her mates. That’s why last year Britain’s growth, though undeniably sluggish, was still the fastest in the G7. Now it’s the slowest, having ground to a halt.

Every economic forecast, apart from those emanating from Rachel’s department, isn’t just pessimistic but doomsday. And even the Office for Budget Responsibility is downgrading forecasts every day.

Incidentally, Trump said yesterday that Starmer’s government has done a “very good job thus far”. That statement is as far from reality as anything Rachel from Complaints is saying, but one hopes that in this case the aetiology of the problem is merely ignorance, not madness.

Then again, Trump can’t be held responsible for anything he says: he is too garrulous to exercise even elementary self-restraint, and too egotistic to hold his statements to any tests of facts or general knowledge.

Thus he made a promise to indulge his fondness for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, tariffs, mentioning plans to introduce levies as high as 40 per cent on all imports.

Then some economically literate advisers must have talked sense into Trump, and the bar began to come down incrementally. First, 40 per cent became 20, then 10, but even such a tariff on British exports to the US would inflict even more damage on our economy than Rachel can cause on her own.

That’s why she is full of praise for Trump, where before she was scathing about him and not always selective in her epithets. Overall, I can’t shake the clichéd feeling that we live in an asylum run by the lunatics. Please, please tell me I’m wrong.