Did you know that Rachel Reeves is a woman?

The new UK Labour government’s first budget yesterday may have been a dreary affair, but there is one group, at least, whom chancellor Rachel Reeves hoped it might inspire. At the despatch box in the House of Commons, she paused to give a message specifically to women and girls. She boasted that she was ‘deeply proud to be Britain’s first ever female chancellor of the exchequer’.

‘To girls and young women everywhere’, she went on, ‘I say, let there be no ceiling on your ambitions, your hopes and your dreams’. Except, perhaps, for the ceiling of economic stagnation that she is imposing on us.

So, why did Reeves feel the need to make such a fuss about her sex? Surely, by now, the novelty of being the first female anything in British politics has worn off a bit. We’ve already had three female prime ministers – a higher rank than chancellor. Margaret Thatcher, the first female PM, entered office 45 years ago. We’ve also had six female home secretaries and two female foreign secretaries. That we hadn’t had a female chancellor until Reeves is surely just an accident of history. No one in mainstream politics seriously believes that this economics stuff ‘just isn’t for girls’.

In truth, if there are any glass ceilings for women left to smash in 21st-century Britain, they are unlikely to be in politics. The most recent General Election actually returned the highest number of female MPs ever recorded, with 40 per cent of constituencies now being represented by women. Over half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet is female. And Rishi Sunak’s last cabinet wasn’t far off that, either. We might even have a fourth female Conservative leader on the way in the form of Kemi Badenoch. All of us can find fault in Britain’s political system, but it clearly doesn’t have a woman problem.

I imagine most people didn’t bat an eyelid when Reeves became chancellor. I doubt some would have even realised she was the first woman to hold the position, were it not for the fuss she has made about it. Shortly after being installed in No11, she vowed to ‘smash glass ceilings and urinals’, referring to the fact that the private bathroom in her office has a urinal (typically, she has already broken this promise, citing the cost and complexity of the plumbing work needed to remove it).

Meanwhile, fawning articles have been written about how Reeves is supposedly ‘rewriting history’ and how ‘significant’ her role is for women. ITV News ran a feature on budget day about Reeves’s supposed ‘girl power’. Perhaps her fellow ‘girl bosses’ in the elite can identify with her meteoric rise, but do working-class women care that much that the chancellor of the exchequer shares their sex?

In truth, Reeves’s obsession with her own sex is a symptom of her political emptiness. She’s not going to be a chancellor who will radically shake up the British economy. She has no unique or bold ideas to transform the public realm. But she can pose as the ‘first’ to have achieved something, simply by reminding us at every opportunity.

Labour’s first budget back in power was always going to be lacklustre and uninspiring, regardless of how the chancellor’s chromosomes are arranged. In the same way that being a woman doesn’t make someone a bad chancellor, it doesn’t necessarily make her a good one, either. We should be judging Rachel Reeves based on her policies, not on what’s between her legs. And on that front, it’s really not looking good.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.