There’s a serious effort under way to get rid of the Chancellor, and it’s coming from inside the Labour Party itself. They’ve seen Rachel Reeves up close and concluded she’s not up to the job. The problem is, they’ve identified somebody they think would be better. And that choice shows just how detached and dangerous the party’s thinking has become.

Labour are the ones who forced Reeves on us in the first place. They then cooked up a strategy of pretending they wouldn’t raise taxes if they won the election, only to dump them on us the moment they got into power. They justified this by claiming to have uncovered a £22billion black hole in the public finances after polling day.

That was an outrageous lie. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out at the time, the hole was “obvious for anyone who dared to look”.

Reeves and Keir Starmer started with lie and have continued in exactly the same vein. It’s habitual now.

Here are 25 other examples of spin and sleight of hand by Reeves. If that isn’t enough, here’s a dozen more from Starmer. What an atrocious pair.

The result? £66billion of extra taxes, weaker growth, rising inflation, sky-high unemployment and a debt and deficit that’s spinning out of control.

Surely nobody could do worse than that? Here’s the terrifying truth. Reeves may actually be the best of the bunch.

One potential replacement, Torsten Bell, is so potty-mouthed he makes the Gallagher brothers sound like choirboys. They’d probably make a better fist of writing a Budget than he did, too.

But now Bell has a more powerful challenger, and he’s the last man in the world I’d choose to run our nation’s finances. In fact, I wouldn’t trust him to price a bacon butty.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the candidate is Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, according to a report in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

Yes, that Ed Miliband.

Labour wouldn’t do it to us, would they? Oh yes they would. The report confirms what I’ve written before. Labour’s activist base loves Mad Ed. They think he’s doing a brilliant job and would happily see him elevated to one of the great offices of state.

In their dream world, he’d be elevated even higher, and become Prime Minister.

That wouldn’t go down too well with the public, who gave Miliband short shift when he tried to win an election in 2015.

So the thinking is this: pair Miliband with a Labour figure who has at least one foot planted in reality, such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood or Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

In that fantasy left-right ticket, Miliband would slide neatly into the role of Chancellor.

This could happen after next May’s elections, when Keir Starmer will be toast. Assuming, of course, those elections actually go ahead.

Starmer would fall, Reeves would return to running the United Nations, or whatever she did before, and Miliband would step up. Which is the most terrifying scenario I can imagine.

Miliband has already done horrendous damage to the UK economy, and he isn’t even Chancellor yet. His breakneck net zero obsession has hammered industry, destroyed manufacturing, wilfully sunk the oil and gas sector, and added hundreds of pounds to household energy bills.

Frankly, I’d rather put China’s Xi Jinping in charge. In fact, Miliband already is.

So that’s what we may have to look forward to in 2026. Chancellor Ed Miliband. Just when it seemed the future couldn’t get more terrifying, it did.