Cast your mind back to April when Guido had a full week’s worth of second job hypocrisy stories, courtesy of LBC and the shadow cabinet. During recess, Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Wes Streeting all agreed to do multi-hour presenting shifts on the station, despite having attacked MPs who spend hours on non-MP work to make extra cash on the side. Reeves, by her own standards and in her own words, was not doing her main job “properly”, Streeting’s LBC gig, in his own words, meant he was disrespecting his electorate. 

Guido’s now consulted the register of members’ interests and noticed a funny discrepancy between the Shadow Chancellor and the Shadow Health Secretary’s entries. Spot the difference:

Reeves, to be fair to her, donated her £600 to charity. Streeting has had no such bout of altruism, pocketing the hypocritical cheque all for himself. Blairites gonna Blairite…

Given how aggressively Labour’s attacking the Tories for handing out a universal £400 energy bill grant – as opposed to means testing it – Guido was surprised to see Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves struggle to commit to sending that cash to a worthy cause during her appearance on TalkTV this morning. After Rishi promised to do just that on his morning media round…

Asked by Jeremy Kyle if she’d donate £400 to charity, Reeves said:

“Well, you know, I’d be happy… I already make donations to charity to ensure that I’m doing that I’m doing what I can to help people who are less well off than myself. But the point is if I were Chancellor, I wouldn’t be designing a system like this. We shouldn’t be designing a system that sees people who are the very wealthiest get as much money as those people who are just about managing… as a result, there is taxpayer money being wasted.”

Unsurprisingly, the Tories out-spending Labour has left Starmer and his team struggling for a decent attack line. Whilst Rishi’s move may be economically questionable, it’s undoubtedly left Labour gasping for oxygen politically. If the Shadow Cabinet’s main opposition is that the policy isn’t means tested, they should be the change they want to see and donate the £400 to a charity for the needy. Now we’ve got Tory backbenchers with a tax and spend leadership, and Labour backbenchers with a leadership arguing against the traditional socialist belief in universal welfare…

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves takes credit for Rishi’s policy changes…

“We pushed for the windfall tax. They’ve adopted it.

We said the buy now pay later scheme was wrong. Now they’ve ditched it.

This government is out of ideas, out of touch and out of time.

When it comes to the big issues facing the country, Mr Speaker, the position is now clear:

We lead. They follow.”

Yesterday it was a hypocritical Wes Streeting hosting a show on LBC, today it’s Rachel Reeves’ turn to leap off the shadow front bench and sub in for James O’Brien. Listen to her Lead Britain’s Conversation for the next three hours here…

Unfortunately for Rachel, she too is now openly admitting to not doing her job properly. Back in November during the Cox second job row, Reeves called for a banning of almost all outside work on the grounds that MPs can only serve their constituents effectively if they do it full-time. Here she is on the Today programme saying that Labour’s proposals:

“would ban pretty much all secondary activity other than being an MP, which is pretty much a full time job if you do it properly.”

Tune in tomorrow for David Lammy…