IS Rachel Reeves on the way out? Westminster sages are seeing the mini-reshuffle undertaken by Keir Starmer this week as the beginning of the end for the Chancellor.

New economic advisers are being appointed in Downing Street, with Reeves’s own deputy Darren Jones being moved to a role as “Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister,” a function previous premiers, from Walpole to Sunak, have managed without.

This is all being read as a creeping marginalisation of Reeves, with Number Ten taking over key economic decision-making.

Her exit would be an act of political justice. Her fingerprints are all over two of the worst decisions of the Labour government’s wretched first year — the scrapping of pensioners’ winter fuel benefits and the attempt to save five billion pounds at the expense of disabled people.

Both policies were wholly or largely abandoned under mass pressure, reflected among panicked back-bench Labour MPs.

But they speak to Reeves’s essential conservatism and her uncritical embrace of the Treasury’s penny-pinching mindset. They also reflect her acceptance of economic ground-rules laid down by the bond market.

However, it would be naive to identify the Chancellor as the root of the problem. The pledges not to raise taxes on business and the rich, decisions which have hamstrung the government, were political judgements made by Starmer.

The buck stops with the Prime Minister. He has shown himself to be politically inept, at best, over the last year, a man without strategy or vision and reliant on a knee-jerk authoritarianism to get his own way — Labour MPs remain suspended for the crime of being right on the attempted welfare cuts.

The premier’s communications could scarcely be worse. He was also forced to appoint his third media supremo in a year this week.

And there is no evidence that he has an economic plan of his own, different to Reeves. He is averse to public ownership or any other moves that might upset the City. His priority is pouring money into the military.

Starmer now pretends that his government is moving into a second “delivery” phase. So far, it amounts to aping Reform’s racist anti-migrant agenda.

This fish is rotting from the head. As Labour MPs return — briefly — to the Commons, they need to focus on the fundamental reset the government needs if it is to be more than the anteroom to a far-right regime.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Palestine solidarity is beyond any doubt

No MP in the present House of Commons has done more in solidarity with the Palestinian people than Jeremy Corbyn.

He has championed their liberation since his first election in 1983. Moreover, the attacks on him over anti-semitism while he was Labour leader were driven above all by his support for the Palestinian cause.

Demands that he publicly describe himself as “anti-zionist” as if he had anything to prove are sectarian nonsense. Just as Zarah Sultana has every right to so describe herself — no socialists should embrace a clearly colonial project — so other supporters of Palestine can choose their own language in what can easily become a toxic debate.

The solidarity movement does not need, at this critical stage in the Gaza genocide, a series of rhetorical purity tests. 

That movement includes those who believe that the days of a plausible two-state solution in Palestine are gone, and those who continue to support it for want of a viable alternative.

Those hounding Corbyn — and indeed everyone — should accept that it is for the Palestinian people themselves to decide what is an acceptable outcome to their struggle. Even well-intentioned friends in Britain have no right to determine that.

Splitting the movement by berating Corbyn is doing the enemy’s work.