Rachel Reeves's Budget is sure to be bad – but one person could make things even worse

If you think Rachel Reeves' Budget is going to be bad (and it certainly will be) what follows could well be even worse – Angela Rayner becoming Prime Minister. Reeves believes this week’s Budget is a make-or-break moment for her and Keir Starmer, whereas in reality they are both toast with an array of Labour MPs waiting in the wings to replace them.

According to an exclusive poll of Labour members for LabourList, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham would all beat Starmer in a head-to-head leadership contest – but only Burnham and Rayner would win by a comfortable margin. Given Burnham isn’t even in Parliament and so can’t run, the winner would almost certainly be the recently disgraced Rayner.

She’s certainly a step ahead of leadership rival Wes Streeting. While he’s been busy in the Department of Health, she’s been busy finding herself a new safer constituency. Both her seat, Ashton-under-Lyme, and Streeting’s, Ilford North, are extremely vulnerable and will probably be lost at the next general election, so a safer seat is vital if Rayner wants to wear the crown.

As we all know, our Ange has already put down roots in Hove, where current MP Peter Kyle is expected to stand down. It's a much more metropolitan seat, several hundred miles away from the north she boasts she loves, but needs must.

So, with Ange looking increasingly like a shoo-in for the top job, what would the country look like under Comrade Rayner and her trade union cheerleaders?

Well, in all likelihood it would just be an even more extreme version of what we’ve already suffered under Starmer – namely more tax increases on the private sector to pay for unaffordable public sector pay-hikes, and a bigger welfare budget.

Then there would no doubt be the rapid and uncompromising introduction of her £5billion-a-year Workers Rights Bill which, on top of Labour's increase in Employers National Insurance and minimum wage, will see unemployment soar and enterprise collapse.

Of course, we’d see more of the socialist mantra “do as I say, not as I do”, with Ange pursuing higher taxes for everyone else that she didn’t think applied to her.

Given her record of delivery in government, we can safely predict that she would be hopelessly out of her depth. Remember she promised a new age of house building promising 1.5 million homes built during this parliament. There’s more chance of David Lammy winning Brain of Britain than that happening.

A Rayner government would only serve to speed up the collapse of this country along ideological lines that Starmer has started. If you own anything, anything at all, Comrade Rayner will be coming for you.