Mirror’s karaoke at the annual festival Labor Party the conference is the politico-professional version of the Spectator’s exclusive champagne party at conservative conference. They are the ones all conference delegates covet as guests.

It was a Keir Starmer– the hole in the shape from the Mirror party in the final evening of the Labor conference last month; the new prime minister went to New York for the United Nations general assembly.

In his absence, House of Commons leader Lucy Powell opened the karaoke with Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger. Scottish Labor leader Anas Sarwar did a duet of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk with Emily Thornberry, the MP who chairs the foreign affairs select committee. Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy sang Amy Winehouse’s Valerie number.

With Starmer gone, the next two most senior members of the government to attend the party were Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

None of them sang. But if Reeves, who on Wednesday will offer a tough United Kingdom budget in the House of Commons, she chose to try, she allegedly tried a version of Abba’s famous ode to tight finances, Money Money Money: “I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay/Isn’t that sad?/And yet I don’t seem to have a dime left/Too bad.”

Although Reeves didn’t pick up the microphone at the Mirror party, she did sing the praises of the Republic’s tax duo, the Finance Minister, according to people there. Jack Chambers and the Minister of Public Expenditure Pascal Donohoe. Reeves was heard telling an Irish official at the party that she was delighted to meet ‘Jack and Paschal’ earlier that month. Donohoe and Chambers had made separate trips to London in early September. They both called Reeves.

Reeves had an unfunded £22 billion (about €26 billion) “black hole” to fill in Britain’s finances as soon as he took office in July after Labour’s election win. In her Budget on Wednesday, she faces a much tougher task: how to boost immediate economic growth while funding Britain’s creaky public services and keeping Labour’s much-vaunted election promise not to raise taxes on workers.

Reeves must accomplish all this while keeping public finances under control and relaxing fiscal rules to allow more borrowing. She is arguably facing the toughest economic conditions of any new chancellor since the Second World War.

Many Labor insiders admit that she certainly has a tougher task than Gordon Brown. When he took over as chancellor in 1997, following Labour’s landslide election victory under Tony Blair, the British economy was already growing at almost 5% a year.

Even Alistair Darling, the Labor chancellor during the 2008 financial crisis, had an easier job than Reeves. Darling basically had no choice but to bail out Britain’s banks because other nations in Europe and also the US were already bailing out their banks at the time, so his central policy was effectively decided for him. Reeves must weigh countless policy options, few of them attractive.

What kind of woman and politician is Reeves? Does he have the steel to make tough decisions? The City of London’s financial chiefs seem to think it does. Reeves courted them assiduously before the election.

Tom Watson, former Labor deputy leader and now a member of the House of Lords, shared a Substack newsletter this week with a well-observed profile of the “Rachel Reeves I know”. Watson has been an acquaintance of hers since she was a teenage activist in the party.

He said she “rarely shows much of her personality in public, beyond her passion for ideas.”

“In private, she is warm and friendly, with a keen sense of fun, although she is always on guard,” Watson wrote. “She deals with internal divisions with caution rather than open confrontation.”

Watson concludes that she is “more emotionally intelligent than her predecessors”. He says Reeves is less of a “party politician” than Brown, but shares her “seriousness” and that she has a “reserved, compartmentalized approach to politics”.

However, there is another factor surrounding Reeves’ appointment as chancellor that could increase the pressure on her even more. She is the first woman in British history to do so. This shouldn’t matter, but the reality of the Westminster press pack means that scrutiny of it will be increased.

“All the things I could do/If I had a little money/It’s a rich man’s world/Money, money, money/It’s got to be funny/In the rich man’s world.”