Since Keir Starmer became prime minister last year, two members of his Cabinet have resigned. A year ago, then-Transport Secretary Louise Haigh quit over failing to report a pre-parliamentary record of petty theft. Then, in September of this year, Angela Rayner stepped down as deputy prime minister over her failure to pay full whack on the taxes of a new house.

Compared to recent ministries, especially those of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, these are relatively placid times. But should they be? Many of Labour’s opponents now have their eyes set on the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has called for Reeves’s resignation after details of the Budget were leaked ahead of time. Yesterday, Scottish First Minister John Swinney followed suit in calling for the Chancellor’s head. Then, late in the afternoon, Office for Budget Responsibility head Richard Hughes announced his resignation after the organisation accidentally published its Budget analysis before Reeves had even spoken in the Commons. Badenoch accused the Chancellor of using Hughes as a “human shield”.

In the quagmire of quangos which comprises the British state, it is an unfortunate but predictable development that a civil servant assumes the kind of departmental responsibility that once might have been expected of a minister. In 1947, on his way to delivering the Budget in Parliament, Chancellor Hugh Dalton let slip the contents to a loose-lipped journalist. He returned the following day to resign. By the time George Osborne was Chancellor in 2013, the whole Budget was leaked to the Evening Standard in advance, yet no heads rolled.

Resignation is a critical element of accountability. Under the British constitution, ministers are collectively responsible for Government policy. If a minister cannot support these policies, they should resign on principle. Earlier this year, then-International Development Minister Anneliese Dodds did just that, a courageous decision which deserves praise.

Similarly, if something goes wrong in the department then the minister must ultimately be the one who takes the fall. In 2018, Amber Rudd rightly resigned as home secretary when the Windrush scandal became evident, even though the major decisions which led to the fiasco were taken by her predecessors.

At the same time, resignation should not be some kind of blood sport purely for the fun of it. Haigh and Rayner stepped down over personal failings, but did those mistakes in any way disrupt the functioning of Government? Perhaps we have become a little too censorious.

This brings us back to Reeves. Should she resign? She hasn’t broken Cabinet collective responsibility, nor is it obvious that there has been a major failing in her department. The early release by the OBR was disorderly, but it was hardly catastrophic. It seems more on a par with Osborne’s Standard snafu than Dalton’s dalliance with Star journalist John Carvel.

Even then, it was not immediately clear that Dalton would resign. In the Budget debate, Winston Churchill said (with apparent sincerity): “May I acknowledge on the part of the Opposition […] our sympathy with him at the misuse of his confidence which has occurred?” Churchill was more sparing than Clement Attlee, who called his own chancellor “a perfect ass”.

If not over the OBR error, should Reeves resign over the dodgy briefing about potential tax increases? In times gone by, this would hardly have been a resignation matter. Who cares if journalists are given the wrong end of the stick? A clever politician might set the hounds chasing a few false hares.

According to his political advisers Joe Haines and Bernard Donoughue, Harold Wilson used to do this all the time. He would feed slightly differing versions of gossip to different ministers and journalists. He’d then see what ended up in the newspapers, using this as a way of identifying leaks.

There is one other reason why ministers should resign: if they are simply not capable of doing their job. Attlee’s favourite description of his departing ministers was a simple “Not up to it”. In a similar vein, in 2002 Labour Education Secretary Estelle Morris resigned, admitting with admirable honesty: “I have not done the job as well as I should have done […] I do not think I was giving the Prime Minister enough.”

That might be a reason for the Chancellor to resign. But, given her annoyance at a businessman recently for his insufficiently respectful tone in her presence, she may not possess the same humility as Estelle Morris.

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Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

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