RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Trump’s placing the Masters Of The University in command of tax cuts… and we’re caught with the Hon Member for Fantasy Island
Donald Trump has yet to announce who will be his Treasury Secretary, America’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.
It’s a key appointment and Trump’s taking his time. He’s spoiled for choice. There are four front-runners, all with impressive backgrounds in high finance.
Joint favourites are Scott Bessent, a successful hedge fund manager and founder, CEO and chief investment officer of a top Wall Street firm, and Howard Lutnick, the billionaire boss of financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald.
Also in the mix are Kevin Walsh, a former Federal Reserve governor and adviser to President George W Bush, and another Wall Street billionaire, Marc Rowan.
Does anyone seriously believe that, were she American, our own Chancellor Martha Reeves would even get an interview, let alone make the cut?
She’d be lucky to get a job making the coffee at the White House.
When Reeves was appointed by Keir Starmer, we were told she was a highly qualified ‘economist’ who had worked at the Bank of England for a decade.
Turned out she may have been somewhat, er, economical with the actualite.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves at a Mansion House dinner in the City of London last week
When she was campaigning to become an MP in 2009, her website said: ‘Rachel has spent her professional career as an economist working for the Bank of England, the British Embassy in Washington and at Halifax Bank of Scotland.’
Or not, as the case may be.
This week, her online profile was changed from ‘economist’ to merely saying she worked in ‘retail banking’.
It now appears that far from being at the cutting edge of planning and decision-making at the Bank of England, she spent much of her six years there – not ten, as previously stated – studying. Sounds to me like she was more graduate trainee or glorified work experience girl.
Two sugars, please, love.
From Threadneedle Street she moved to Leeds, where her CV again claims she was an economist for the Bank of Scotland, aka HBOS.
It has since emerged that she actually worked in the complaints department at what used to be the Halifax Building Society before it merged with the BOS.
She was also involved in the retail mortgage division at HBOS when it became the second biggest bank to collapse in British history and had to be bailed out by Lloyds.
So not exactly the glittering career in high finance she would like us to believe. Yet now this Hon Member for Fantasy Island is in charge of the nation’s finances.
As I observed a couple of months ago, when it first became apparent that her CV was a work of fiction right up there with Harry Potter, making Martha Chancellor was a bit like putting me in charge of WH Smith because I once had a paper round.
If we’d wanted someone from the Halifax, we’d have been better off appointing Howard, the bouncing bank clerk from Birmingham who shot to fame as the face of the popular Get A Little Xtra Help ads on television a few years back.
I can’t imagine Martha dancing in the street with a chorus line of happy Halifax customers. She’s more likely to have been chased around the block by pensioners angry at her decision to axe the £300 winter fuel payment, especially as it has subsequently been revealed that she claimed £4,400 towards her own domestic heating bills on her Parliamentary exes.
Her personal financial record is not without blemish, either. For instance, in 2015 she had her official House of Commons credit card suspended after racking up more than £4,000 of ‘invalid’ spending on expenses.
And despite Reeves and her husband having a joint, pre-election income of around £200,000 a year, she accepted £7,500 from a friend to buy frocks.
It then emerged that she’d also enjoyed a free family holiday in Cornwall, worth £1,400, which she hadn’t properly declared to the Parliamentary watchdog.
That’s not all, either. Last year, she published a book aimed at boosting her credentials, called The Women Who Made Modern Economics. An investigation by the Financial Times discovered that it was a cut-and-paste job. She’d downloaded some of the material unacknowledged from the internet, including the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia.
(Full disclosure: I just cut-and-pasted that last paragraph from a column I wrote in September. But at least it was all my own work.)
Why should we believe a word this woman says? We’ve already had to listen ad nauseum to her droning on about the £22 billion ‘black hole’ she inherited from the Tories and pretended to know nothing about – even though the books were there for all to examine.
Reeves keeps complaining that the economy is in worse shape than at any time since the Second World War – a claim met with derision by anyone with an ounce of financial expertise.
She insists on talking down Britain’s economic prospects, something which will become a self-fulfilling prophecy unless she shuts up sharpish. Who wants to invest in a country whose own Chancellor pretends is a basket case?
Giving Reeves the keys to Number 11 is like putting Del Boy’s Uncle Albert in charge of the Admirality.
Meanwhile, as Trump prepares to Make America Great Again, turbo-charge the US economy with tax cuts and put one of the Masters Of The Universe in charge of the Treasury, we’re lumbered with a work-experience girl who once answered the phones at the Halifax’s complaints hotline.
We’re going to need all the Xtra help we can get.
