After her chaotic Budget, Rachel Reeves could use a break from the limelight. Keir Starmer certainly seems to think so.

The Labour Party is in a frenzy as the hard-left seizes control. Incredibly, Angela Rayner is positioning herself as a future Prime Minister, even as HMRC pores over her tax bills. Wes Streeting still nurtures leadership ambitions, despite being a close chum of Peter Mandelson, who’s now toxic to all who touch him. Andy Burnham is firing off demands for a more left-wing agenda, even though he’s not even an MP. And Ed Miliband thinks the best way to rally Labour’s troops is to promise them a full-blown class war.

Even Reeves can’t compete with this clown show. Instead, she’s sitting tight and letting them get on with it. At some point she’ll be elbowed out of Number 11. Either by Starmer, or by whichever joker replaces him. And here’s the shocking thing. We’ll miss her when she’s gone.

Heaven knows she’s made mistakes. All those false pre-election tax pledges. The winter fuel payment row. Failure to cut welfare spending. The £25billion “jobs tax”. The farmers’ inheritance tax fiasco. The 2p Budget income tax hike that never was. The battering of pubs. I could go on.

But she has one thing in her favour. She understands, however dimly, that a British government cannot simply spend whatever it likes without consequences.

That’s the bare minimum you’d expect from a chancellor, but it’s more sense than any of her colleagues show. Reeves has set herself fiscal rules to borrow only for investment and to at least try to shrink the deficit. In today’s Labour Party, that practically makes her a Tory.

It’s why backbenchers gleefully torpedoed her welfare reforms and forced her to scrap the two-child benefit cap. She sits on the right of a party that’s marching left at speed. And when she goes, she won’t be replaced by a moderate.

Whoever takes her place will belong to Labour’s ascendant left. They will junk Reeves’s fiscal rules at the first opportunity, along with her few remaining restraints on tax and spending.

Reeves has had to placate this faction while governing a country already drowning in debt. She’s the only Labour figure the bond market trusts. After her, comes the deluge.

Income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, property taxes… all will be back on the table. Growth will collapse, which will then be used to justify still more tax raids. If the bond market panics and revolts, we could be on course for a Liz Truss-style meltdown. Reeves has made colossal blunders, but at least she tried. What follows may be madness.