The line is that Rachel Reeves had to accept Sabrina Carpenter tickets, reportedly worth £600, for security reasons. Sure, she could have bought her own tickets, but how safe would she be in a mosh pit, with her approval ratings at 58% against, 17% in favour? I would argue still pretty safe. I personally disapprove quite strongly of Reeves’s performance in the exchequer: her dispiriting, intellectually shonky defeatism (for decisions, apparently, that can’t be helped) and empty boosterism (for the growth she thinks she can conjure). Yet I wouldn’t dream of ruining an evening of bouncy pop by accosting her, which I’m sure goes for most Carpenter fans. I wouldn’t even give her a piece of my mind at some musically appropriate event, like a Billy Bragg concert.

Heidi Alexander started a half-hearted attempt to defend Reeves in an interview with Times Radio, which turned into an absolute knee-capping halfway through. “I actually sadly haven’t been to see any concerts at all over the last nine months,” said the transport secretary, “partly because I’ve been very, very busy.”

There are two counts against the chancellor. She shouldn’t have accepted the tickets; the fact that she did meant she wasn’t busy enough. On that second point, I’m going to lodge a tiny defence. There is no right amount of busy for the chancellor to be. Any attempt to publicly exert herself in the national interest would look like a stunt, yet keeping her head down inspires no confidence. Really, the only right way to be in this situation is not-chancellor. If, for some reason, you absolutely have to be chancellor, then it is probably safest, whatever you do, never to visibly enjoy it. This strikes out any association at all with Carpenter, and even a covers band in a local pub.

Let’s throw in a third count against her: this error was far from forced. After the shambles of last year, with Keir and the Taylor Swift tickets (which he subsequently paid back), Keir and the “designer” glasses (it’s a red flag when any politician has a “designer” anything), Reeves’s own admission that before the election she’d accepted a cash donation from Juliet Rosenfeld for her campaign trail wardrobe, and the endless discussions all of this sparked about whether the new government was really any different from the old, it should have been obvious that freebies are to be avoided until such time as the public has forgotten every politician who has ever been profligate in the 21st century. Nobody can say how long this will take. I think I’ll be wondering what Boris Johnson’s wallpaper looked like until I die.

That can all be filed under “optics”, and should have been obvious to this political generation, who were raised to ask “how will this look?” first and “is this important?” some time later, if at all. There’s a whole other vexed area, that of “vibe” – there’s a reason why Tony Blair could ask Noel Gallagher to Downing Street and it smell like the winds of change, rather than frivolous nonsense from a prime minister who should have been concentrating on his government’s minimum wage legislation. When there is optimism in the air, when people are feeling prosperous (never mind for now whether that feeling was warranted or merely a debt-fuelled mass delusion), leaders almost have a duty to echo that by visibly enjoying themselves.

Contrast that with the sight of George Osborne at the London Paralympics in 2012. The former chancellor was booed by spectators because his austerity measures had already hit disabled people so hard, and the juxtaposition of him then basking in the glory of Paralympians’ achievements was too much to take. But there was an underlying sense, too, that no politician, least of all the chancellor, can talk about tough choices in their day job, then throw on their chinos and enjoy the weekend. There pretty much has to be no visible enjoyment until the tough times have passed. Which is to say, even if Reeves had paid for her tickets, the news of her attending a Carpenter gig would probably still have generated opprobrium, though it might have taken a less verbal, more grunting form.

Really there’s no answer to this, except, no rock’n’roll (or country pop) until the good times are also rolling.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.