WHAT are a Chancellor’s tears worth? We now have an answer.

Close observers noted that at Prime Minister’s Questions last week Rachel Reeves shed exactly two, which is not a lot but considerably more than is usual for the occasion, where raucous forced laughter is more the metier.

Within minutes the price of servicing British government debt rose by 0.2 per cent to 4.7 per cent as rattled investors feared that the Iron Chancellor was weeping her way out.

The annual debt servicing cost is around £107 billion annually. Each 0.1 per cent increase would therefore be £107 million.

So there we have it — the lachrymose Chancellor was on course to cost the taxpayer £214m with two tears.

It would certainly be worth the Treasury passing the hat round for a box of Kleenex to be strategically placed by the government dispatch box in the Commons every time Reeves takes her place.

Kemi Badenoch, sitting on the bench opposite, had noted Reeves’s unhappiness — a rare example of the Tory leader being up with the curve rather than lagging several space-time continuums behind it — and invited Keir Starmer to commit to retaining the services of the Chancellor until the next general election.

Starmer, who combines the emotional intelligence of the average sofa with the tactical flexibility of a French general atop the Maginot line, declined to do so; apparently unaware that “personal issues” were sinking the economy right next to him.

His blunder compounded the view of the bond market, far more attuned to the miseries of the human condition than the Labour leader, that Reeves was toast.

For every tear they added a point to the debt yield, signalling their conviction that without Reeves and her new austerity at the helm Britain — or their version of it — would face crisis.

Within a few moments, however, the Prime Minister’s political spokesman was informing journalists that Starmer had, in fact, meant to say that “yes, of course Reeves is safe in her job.”

In the intervening minutes, had someone told Starmer “Rachel looked really upset in there and your answer to the question about her future doesn’t appear to have helped”?

Or had he been advised that the bond market was partying like Truss and Kwarteng were still bestriding Downing Street, incanting the wisdom of Hayek into the teeth of an economic hurricane to no avail?

Either way, this was a U-turn that apparently required visual back-up, so a crack team of Project Embrace strategists were deployed to organise a Starmer-Reeves hug for the cameras the next day at an event supposed to be about Labour’s plans for the NHS.

It was not exactly Elliott and ET for emotional resonance — more two porcupines courting — but at least all was well in bond market world, for now anyway.

So what just happened here? Luckily, there are always City analysts to hand to advise on the mysteries of romance and relationships, or at least big money’s concerns about the class struggle.

Here is Simon French, chief economist at an investment bank that goes by Panmure Liberum. He explains the bond market’s trauma at Rachel’s distress thus: “Almost all other chancellor options from within the Parliamentary Labour Party” are less market-friendly.

In other words, if Starmer trades out the Iron Chancellor for a more let’s say plastic model then the famous fiscal rules being used to beggar the poor the better to accommodate war may not survive the transition.

French offered his clients a succinct summary of capital’s anxieties after the week’s events, which of course included the collapse of the Starmer-Reeves plan to axe disability benefits in order to free up cash for ever-increasing arms spending.

“Recent weeks have shown that large parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the UK do not have the stomach for the tough fiscal choices required in a normalised interest rate environment, amidst sluggish productivity growth, with the tax burden at an eight-decade high, and with a deteriorating demographic profile.

“The lack of a working majority for its economic plans leaves the Labour government with an intractable problem — its credibility with financial markets hinges on adherence to a set of fiscal rules that are incompatible with its manifesto tax commitments, and the plans outlined at the recent Spending Review.”

As a review of the government’s self-imposed dilemma it could be a Morning Star editorial.

One key phrase there is “in the UK.” That tells us that Mr French is speaking to New York’s investors above all, a group of people who, in their storied past, applied the pressure that led to the collapse of the MacDonald government in 1931, inter an awful lot of alia.

His analysis is echoed by Neil Wilson, a strategist at Saxo Markets. Reeves, he said, is probably the “the most market-friendly chancellor Labour could field,” adding “that she is required at No 11 to avert a market response that delivers a death blow to the government.”

And here, from Wilson, is the decisive line: “The PM can’t control his backbenchers, but maybe the bond market can.”

There is the current domestic political conjuncture in a phrase. Just as Starmer has — incredibly for a premier with such an immense parliamentary majority no more than a year old — found that he cannot force his cuts through Parliament, so the bond market has reasserted its right to choose his Cabinet.

Put another way, the City stands behind him as he confronts democracy.

“Investors probably saved the Chancellor,” avers a third City talking head, Andrew Wishart of Berenberg Bank. “By selling sterling assets investors have probably kept UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her post.”

So the City has effectively mandated that the Weeping Chancellor must remain in post, as their defence against any deviation from the stern tram lines within which British economic policy must be conducted.

Remarkable as it is that 49 Labour MPs still voted against the welfare Bill, even after it had been denuded of the cuts to personal independence payments which had given rise to an original 130 backbenchers rising in rebellion, it is clear that still more will be required to impose a different strategy on No 10.

In the tug-of-war over Starmer’s soul — no sniggering — elected Labour representatives are up against big capital and are apparently losing. If the Prime Minister had indeed been contemplating a change at the Treasury, he buckled within minutes.

Given that the bond barons ate Truss for breakfast, the Prime Minister’s choice may make sense.

But the PLP could eat him for dinner, too. Let it be recorded that on his other side at PMQs was Angela Rayner. She was not crying at all. Not even a sniffle.

Perhaps to cheer up international investors she could try a bit harder this week and reflect unhappily on her own “personal issues,” perhaps imagining some if she is happy enough to have none ready-made.

That should lead to a drop in the price of debt as it convinces the bond market that the leader of the ersatz left in the government is not anticipating preferment.

Each Rayner tear could take a point off the yield — freeing up enough funds to send a few more tanks and missiles to Ukraine, thereby forging a direct causal link between ministerial emotions and dead Russians, a historic breakthrough for British strategy.

It may be objected that we do not really know why the Chancellor was crying in the first place. Theories abound, including those involving blunt Lancastrian Speaker Lindsay Hoyle.

Which of us can see that deeply into Reeves’s psyche? But the markets were absolutely sure she wasn’t crying for the disabled who she had just tried, and failed, to rob of £5 billion in benefits.

As for Starmer himself, if he sobs at all it will be in his No 10 flat, two or three whiskies in of an evening as he wonders where it all went wrong.

He imagines he hears the tread on the stairs of the “men in grey suits” whose arrival in Downing Street, like the flight of the ravens from the Tower of London, presages the end.

The door will swing open and an apparition with the austere attire of Philip Snowden and the death mask rictus of Tony Blair will intone: “The bond market has sent us.”

The Prime Minister may then be allowed a tear.