I now know that Rachel Reeves is a narcissist. How? Allow me to explain. When I’m pottering down the streets of the West London suburb in which I live thinking about how screwed Britain is, she inevitably pops into my head to crush any remnants of endorphins into an oblivion she’s fashioned with her parody of economic stewardship. So depressing is the landscape that her policies have puked up that thinking of England risks thoughts not of churches, green fields and pubs, but of a grey hellscape tortured by technocrats. I wonder if it’s time to finally give up and leave the country.
There are a few things that can cure this bad mood and get her vacuous visage out of my head. That can drown out that artificially authoritative groan that is her excuse for a voice. But if I’m already out and about then the clarity hits: I’ll go to the pub. Escape for a couple of pints of Guinness or, if truly blessed by providence, that rarest and best of stouts: Murphy’s.
And yet today I read that Rachel Reeves is doing everything in her power to make it harder for pubs to survive. And without their survival of course, that’s one escape plan torn from my list of ways to mute the mental torture.
I won’t be able to cling onto Labour’s insistence that it cares about this great British institution because I’ll know that in January 2026 its Chancellor refused to do anything to help pubs despite Sir Keir Starmer admitting that they “will struggle” with new business rates changes.
This is against a backdrop of eight pubs closing every single week in the UK as they already struggle under rises in employers’ national insurance, another socialist sprog that should have been aborted.
So round streets I’ll wander, unable to get the faces of a Government that promised to tread lightly on the lives of Brits out of my mind.
There Rachel Reeves will sit, smiling sure in the knowledge that I’m thinking of her policies. She’ll become the woman around whom my world revolves.
Which is exactly the outcome a narcissist would want.