SARAH VINE: If Rachel Reeves thinks all her critics are misogynists, how come so many ladies like me suppose she’s ineffective?

This lunchtime, all eyes will be on the Chancellor Rachel Reeves as she finally swings the axe.

Who knows what bloodshed she will inflict on the ever-dwindling and exhausted pool of British taxpayers, entrepreneurs and savers in her Government’s increasingly desperate attempts to shore up their support base.

I could be wrong, of course. She could scrap stamp duty, slash welfare spending, press pause on infrastructure spending, cut overseas aid, tax electric cars (that alone would raise about £2billion), reverse inheritance tax on family farms, soften the draconian new employment laws and generally send a signal that Britain is open for business and not just a socialist sinkhole where all initiative is suffocated at birth.

But I won’t hold my breath. Tradition dictates that the Chancellor is allowed a glass of something fortifying in the chamber to sustain them through the delivery of the Budget; I reckon we’ll all need a stiff one by the time she sits down.

One thing is certain, though. Whatever criticism is levied at her in the wake of this Budget, however disastrous it proves for her career and reputation, none of it has the slightest bit to do with the fact that she is female.

And yet that is what she has spent the days in the run-up to today’s announcements telling anyone who will listen. Not, as you might have thought, making the fiscal and political case for her choices – but whining incessantly about how unfair everyone is being to her because she’s a woman.

Reeves’ narrative is clear: she’s not having a hard time because she is incompetent, uninspiring and politically dishonest (she lied on her CV and has repeatedly said she would not raise taxes); it’s because of sexist attitudes towards female politicians.

I’m sorry, but that’s just pathetic. The worst kind of poor-little-me-ism.

Rachel Reeves has claimed she is ‘sick of people mansplaining how to be Chancellor’

Decades of feminism, and that’s the best she can do, hide behind her own blow-dry? Mary Wollstonecraft will be spinning in her grave.

Interviewed by Keir Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin in The Times at the weekend she declared, rather airily, that she is ‘sick of people mansplaining how to be Chancellor to me’.

Newsflash: I know plenty of women who would be perfectly delighted to explain to her how she could be better at her job – not least the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, also a woman.

Badenoch herself is no stranger to the brickbats of politics. Last year, the actor David Tennant chose to accept a ‘Celebrity Ally’ gong at the LGBT Awards with the words: ‘Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more — I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up — whilst we do live in this world, I am honoured to receive this.’ Her crime? To advocate for single-sex spaces for women.

Christopher Chope, meanwhile, the MP for Christchurch in Dorset, argued that she would not be a suitable leader of the Opposition because she ‘is preoccupied with her own children’.

Pretty low, you’ll agree. Yet she doesn’t use any of this stuff as an excuse to justify her struggles in the polls. She doesn’t expect special treatment; she just gets on with it.

Indeed, by comparison, I would argue that Reeves has quite a decent time of it, especially after she burst into tears in the chamber a few months ago. I wrote at the time that I felt rather sorry for her.

Plenty of other commentators felt the same – not because she’s a woman, just because she’s a human being as well as a politician, and some things transcend politics.

That said, most women I know in positions of authority like hers would never show weakness in front of their colleagues. They know from experience – as do I – that if you want to beat the men at their own game (which is what politics very much still is), you can’t afford to let them see the whites of your eyes.

That does not mean you have to be any less of a woman – as Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, once said, ‘a woman does not have to be masculine to succeed in a man’s world’ – just that sex cannot be used as an excuse for being sub-par at your job. You especially can’t do so if, like Reeves, you have made such a song and dance about being a female chancellor in the first place. She has used this historic fact time and again in the service of her own self-promotion, using it as an example of her own brilliance.

She also bangs on endlessly about her working-class roots, and has said that ‘it’s not usual for girls from my background to go on to do what I’m doing today’.

Maybe. But Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter who made it all the way to prime minister almost five decades ago. So that glass ceiling has already been well and truly smashed.

Truth is, plenty of women can, and do, make it to the top. All the time. Reeves is not exceptional in that respect.

She is, however, exceptional in her apparent inability to do the job she has been tasked with. That’s not sexism. It’s fact.

What matters is not getting there, it’s how you perform when you are in the role. And Reeves, I’m afraid, has been less than impressive at every turn.

That’s not a personal criticism – I have no doubt she’s a lovely person to her friends and family; indeed, one of my own friends knows her quite well and says she’s very nice.

It’s just an objective assessment, based on her performance and the performance of the British economy under her watch.

As to the idea that she’s somehow being singled out as a woman chancellor, that’s just not true. George Osborne was dubbed ‘Boy George’ on account of his youth and perceived naivety (honestly the least naive person I’ve ever known); Gordon Brown was called Flash Gordon; Rishi Sunak had Dishy Rishi (really quite sexist) or Chino (chancellor in name only).

Philip Hammond was Spreadsheet Phil, Kwasi Kwarteng was ‘Kwame-Kwasi’ after his disastrous mini-budget – and poor Nigel Lawson was known as ‘the Fat Controller’, after the character in Thomas The Tank Engine.

By comparison ‘Rachel from Accounts’ seems quite tame, especially when you consider poor Liz Truss ended up as a ‘Lettuce’.

Many of these chancellors were Tories, and Reeves’ party jeered along accordingly. Like it or not, this kind of thing is just part and parcel of the job. Politics is a nasty, cut-throat business. That doesn’t mean the jibes don’t hurt; merely that it’s the name of the game regardless of who you are and where you come from.

To single Reeves out for kid-glove treatment just because she is a woman would not only be patronising. It would also be, dare I say it, rather sexist. Not to mention that it would undermine her authority as a woman in a position of power.

So no, Rachel Reeves is not the victim of ‘mansplaining’ or sexism. If she’s a victim of anything, it’s of a Prime Minister and a Cabinet whose idiotic, short-sighted and ill-thought-out policies are surely and not-so-slowly flushing Britain down the plughole.

As Chancellor, she’s in a position to actually do something about that.

Stop making excuses, start making good decisions. Maybe then she might actually prove her critics wrong.