Rachel Reeves has insisted that her critics “won’t get me down” after the UK’s poor economic performance led to intense speculation about her future.

Keir Starmer was forced to insist that she would remain chancellor “for many many years to come” after initially failing to say her job was safe.

Rising government borrowing costs, anaemic economic growth and rising inflation led to Tory accusations that Reeves was out of her depth.

But speaking on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, Reeves hit back at her critics.

The chancellor said: “I haven’t taken it personally this week. It’s political. There’s some people don’t want me to succeed, there’s some people don’t want this government to succeed. That’s fair enough, that’s their prerogative.

“But I’m not going to let them get me down. I’m not going to let them stop me from doing what this government has got a mandate to do. That’s grow the economy [and] make working people better off.

“People have been through a tough time in the past few years. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Reeves also defended controversial decisions like removing winter fuel payments from millions of pensioners and changing inheritance tax rules for farmers.

She said they were “the right decisions in the national interest”.

Reeves said: “What was the alternative? All decisions have consequences but imagine the alternative.

“Imagine that I hadn’t addressed that problem and now when financial markets look at the UK, they would be saying ‘this is a government that is not real about the situation that it faces, it is spending more money than it is bringing in. It’s having to borrow more and more’.”