Rachel Reeves has her failings, but the rest of the Labour Party is worse. When she’s gone, the real lunatics will take charge, and today’s insane tax-and-spend policies will accelerate. She’s now a puppet chancellor, and there’s someone rather worrying pulling the strings.

Reeves’s goose was cooked the moment she fluffed the Winter Fuel Payment cut. And it was burned to a crisp when she backtracked on her half-hearted attempt to cut welfare benefits. But the final blow came when a certain Torsten Bell was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury in January.

Bell may have the smooth, dimpled cheeks of a choir boy, but don’t be fooled. He’s a swivel-eyed ranter who can outswear any sailor when he gets going.

As I’ve reported before, this jumped-up, potty-mouthed, over-promoted bighead thinks he owns every room he walks into.

Treasury veterans leave meetings with ears ringing and blood boiling, as he talks and talks and talks, and never listens. Here’s a sample of his take on economic policy, by someone who was there. “It was ‘fck this, fck that, we’ve got to fck them all and then we’ve got to fck them some more.’”

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Nice bloke. Along with the less sweary James Murray, who was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury in September, Bell is front-runner to replace Reeves. But here’s the thing: Torsten Bell is acting like here’s already running No 11.

The Telegraph reports Reeves has effectively lost her grip on power because Bell accompanied her to every key meeting with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) before the Budget.

Even Murray was snubbed, along with everyone else at the Treasury, despite Bell being one of the most junior ministers there.

He’s only been an MP for 18 months after being parachuted into a safe Labour seat, Swansea West, at the last election.

Bell charmed locals by claiming he’d help boost their wages but all he’s done so far is drive up their tax bills.

Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride reckons he’s now “calling the shots in the Treasury” after drafting the Budget on behalf of Reeves.

This explains why the Budget was so dreadful: it was “substantially written by someone who has spent his career campaigning for higher taxes and higher welfare spending,” Stride said.

Bell doesn’t just use four-letter words — he’s obsessed with a three-letter word too: tax. The T-word pops up almost as often as the F-word, and a large proportion of the taxes he rants on about will hit pensioners in the pocket.

Bell was director of the left-leaning Resolution Foundation think tank for a decade, and many of the measures it dreamed up are already in force.

They include inheritance tax on farmers, businesses, and unused pensions, as well as capital gains tax hikes, dividend tax hikes, council tax hikes, and new taxes on everything from buy-to-let landlords to electric vehicles.

Not all his ideas have come into force yet. He also wants to cut the 25% tax-free pension lump sum, apply CGT to home sales and inheritances, cap tax-free ISAs, scrap the £325,000 IHT nil-rate band, and much more. All in the name of what he calls inter-generational fairness. Basically, it’s a combined tax assault on older people.

Bell is in dictating policy, not Reeves. And pensioners will curse the day.