The breakfast news this morning was topped by the story that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is being criticised by the Tories and the tabloids for breaking housing rules when renting out her family home. I must admit hearing this wound me up instantly. If anything it is a total non-story – an honest mistake which Reeves has already dealt with. Yet the way in which the Tories and the right wing were pouncing on it, demanding that Reeves resigns and calling her position ‘untenable’, I think tells us everything we need to know about them. How many tories will have made similar mistakes? How many of them will have second homes which, being tories, they’ll have refused to pay tax on? Does the reactionary press make a fuss about them?

Of course not. Thus in reacting like this the tories have made their characters clear: they are immature and ignorant; they cannot accept honest mistakes and think only they have a right to lead. They think that only they should have things like second homes, and if anyone they see as inferior to them dares to transgress their rules, they run to the gutter press as though some unspeakable felony has been committed. They see the world in reductionist, simplistic terms, and are as juvenile as the man-child currently leading America. Reeves has nothing to answer for, but the tories’ grotesque reaction tells us all we need to know about such infantile, hypocritical people.