A few months back, when she was chasing your vote, Rachel Reeves sat down with the women’s glossy Stylist to ‘talk about her life as an MP and the forthcoming election’.
After revealing that ‘the first thing I do in the mornings’ is play the online game Wordle, then sharing her exercise habits (‘I try to go running a couple of times a week to unwind’), she was asked: ‘What’s the last lie you told?’
‘I’m not a very good liar; I wouldn’t be a good poker player,’ was her response.
Having got that off her chest, our then-shadow Chancellor went to considerable lengths to explain why readers ought to trust her with Britain’s purse strings.
‘I started my career as an economist at the Bank of England and I worked in financial services for many years before I became a politician,’ she said, arguing that these roles had provided ‘training’ that she would ‘take to the job as chancellor’.
It was a well-worn script for Reeves, who before, during and after the General Election set out her stall as a hardcore economic wonk.
‘Rachel has spent her professional career as an economist,’ was how her personal website put it. She worked as an economist at the Bank of England, the British Embassy in Washington DC and latterly at Halifax Bank of Scotland [HBOS],’ read an official biography handed to organisers of speaking gigs.
‘I spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England and loved it,’ she told a magazine in 2021.
A couple of weeks back, Rachel Reeves’s online CV was stealthily edited in a way that made the Chancellor’s career look significantly less impressive than before
During TV interviews, Reeves likes to begin answers with the words ‘as an economist’. In PR films uploaded to her social media, she has often boasted: ‘I worked at the Bank of England for the best part of a decade.’ And so on.
The pitch has on one level proved remarkably successful: the 45-year-old mother-of-two now occupies the second-biggest job in British politics. Yet in recent days, it has also spawned a somewhat surreal PR crisis.
The issue revolves around her CV, specifically the version she has uploaded to the professional networking website LinkedIn.
Until very recently, this claimed that Reeves had spent her entire career prior to entering Parliament in 2010 working as an ‘economist’.
Specifically, Reeves claimed on LinkedIn that she was a ‘full time’ economist at the Bank of England from September 2000 to December 2006. Then her profile said she moved to HBOS as an ‘economist: full time’ until December 2009. In other words, her CV reflected the official narrative, which she had so endlessly talked about.
But then something very odd happened. A couple of weeks back, the document was stealthily edited in a way that made her career look significantly less impressive than before.
Ever since, the Chancellor’s online profile has stated merely that she worked in ‘retail banking’ from 2006-2009.
Behind these changes lie an intriguing suggestion: that Reeves has, as the well-worn phrase in Westminster goes, ‘sexed up’ her professional track record in an effort to convince voters that she’s exceptionally-well qualified to run the British economy.
This week, such claims were even aired in Parliament, where a string of Tory MPs used Prime Minister’s Questions to suggest that she had ‘misrepresented’ her credentials, while the Reform MP Lee Anderson joked that ‘Rachel from Accounts’ ought to place her CV ‘in the trash can’. The controversy surrounding her CV started life with two viral internet posts.
Until very recently, Reeves claimed on LinkedIn that she was a ‘full time’ economist at the Bank of England from September 2000 to December 2006. She is pictured outside the BoE last year
On October 24, the political blog Guido Fawkes published an item saying that her work for HBOS had been misrepresented on LinkedIn and in speeches.
The website asserted that she had actually had a ‘mid-level’ role in a ‘mundane support department’ that ‘managed administration processes, IT matters and small projects and planning’. Reeves, this report claimed, was part of ‘a team of three people far from the economics department’.
Then, on November 6, a retired former colleague at HBOS weighed in. Kevin Gillett, who had been a senior director at the firm, used his own LinkedIn page to question whether Reeves had ever been employed there as an economist, as she had endlessly claimed.
His post described Reeves as a relatively junior ‘complaints support manager’ who worked ‘three levels below me’. Gillett then made a more troublesome claim: that the Chancellor had ‘nearly got sacked due to an expenses scandal’ before landing herself in a sticky spot with the HR department for taking lots of time off for ‘doctors/dentists visits’.
‘Turns out she was doing Labour council business,’ he wrote. ‘When shown the facts, she resigned.’
The post quickly went viral.
It must be said that its claims about expense abuse and unauthorised absences are vigorously disputed, with sources close to Reeves insisting: ‘We cannot stress how sharply we refute them.’
Nevertheless, the Chancellor’s team updated her online CV shortly afterwards to ‘clarify’ what her actual role had been.
Yesterday, the i newspaper reported that rather than being an economist at HBOS, she worked in customer relations and mortgages. Specifically, her job titles were ‘head of planning, customer relations’ and ‘head of customers, mortgages’.
To the Tories, who point out that Reeves has endlessly criticised her opponents for alleged duplicity, the stench of hypocrisy is overpowering.
Internet memes of ‘Rachel from Accounts’ faking personal achievements are now doing the rounds on social media
One online joke depicts the Chancellor winning an Academy Award
Shadow Paymaster General Richard Holden this week wrote to Reeves ‘seeking clarity’ about her career prior to politics, saying that falsifying a CV is an ‘incredibly serious’ matter that ‘would raise significant concerns about your ability to be honest with the British public’. He asked a series of questions about her real role at both the Bank of England and HBOS.
Reeves, for her part, is believed to regard the dispute as a storm in a teacup. Friends of the Chancellor now admit she might have occasionally used ‘loose language’ to describe her career before politics. However, they insist the overall characterisation has always been broadly correct.
They accept that she overstated by several years the length of time she actually spent at the Bank of England.
They also concede that although she claimed to have worked as an HBOS ‘economist,’ she was in fact in a far more junior role (though they dispute the claim that her actual job title was ‘Complaints Support Manager’). More importantly, they argue that the mistakes were largely frivolous.
‘It’s a bit of loose language on a CV or whatever,’ was how her chum Siôn Simon, a former Labour MP, put it on the radio this week.
Proving beyond doubt what has gone on is tricky since both the Bank of England and HBOS are believed to delete personnel files after a decade, in keeping with industry protocols.
But by winding the clock back to the early 2000s, when Reeves graduated from Oxford with a 2:1 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, you can get a reasonable idea.
The daughter of teachers, who grew up in Lewisham, South London, and was educated at a comprehensive school, Reeves joined the Labour party as a teenager and became a fully minted class warrior during her student days. She once claimed to have been embarrassed while ‘swapping addresses with my new friends from university at the end of the first term’ because ‘their houses didn’t have numbers, they had names’.
In interviews ever since, Reeves has repeatedly claimed to have ‘spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England,’ saying she turned down a lucrative job offer from Goldman Sachs to join the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.
However, what she says about the BOE is simply not true. She actually joined the Bank on its graduate trainee scheme, rather than as an ‘economist’ and spent about five (rather than ten) full years working there, while also taking 12 months out to study for an MA in economics from the LSE, and spending a year on ‘secondment’ at the British Embassy in Washington. Repeatedly claiming to have spent a ‘decade’ there is sloppy at best.
Neither is it correct to describe Reeves as having ‘worked as an economist’ throughout her time at the Bank. Instead, according to an unguarded post she made on Twitter back in 2012, she was a ‘very junior Japan analyst’ for her first couple of years.
Be that as it may, Reeves left the bank in late 2006 and moved to the HBOS head office in Leeds.
It might seem unusual for a 27-year-old Oxbridge and LSE-educated economist – with a stint at the Bank of England – to take a relatively unglamorous role in an office outside the capital. But her move North appears to have been motivated by other priorities.
For one thing, she was following her heart. At the Bank of England, she had co-authored papers with a Polish-born staffer named Mike Sawicki. An office romance bloomed, and by 2007 they were living together in Kirkstall.
(The relationship didn’t survive, and in 2011 she married Nick Joicey, a civil servant nine years her senior, with whom she has two children.)
Perhaps more importantly, for a woman of ambition, the 2006 relocation also opened up political opportunities. Having twice stood as a Labour party election candidate, without success, in her native Bromley, she was in search of a safe seat. And it just so happened that such a vacancy was about to open up in Leeds West, where veteran MP John Battle was approaching retirement.
When Reeves sought selection in August 2007, local party members were told she had ‘moved to Leeds two years ago and lives with her partner in Kirkstall.’ Yet again, that seems to have been an exaggeration: she had moved north just ten months earlier. But she nonetheless bagged the nomination.
At the time, a local newspaper told voters: ‘Oxford-educated Ms Reeves has worked in finance in the British embassy in Washington, USA, and is currently an economist with the Halifax Building Society.’ The last bit was, of course, incorrect – though the fault might lie with the paper rather than the subject, of course.
Similarly, shortly after her selection, Reeves also gave an interview to the Guardian which reported (again wrongly) that she ‘works as an analyst for one of the capitalised banks, Lloyds Banking Group’. The following year, she muddied the waters further on becoming a director of Leeds-based charity Barca. On her appointment form held by Companies House, she chose to describe her ‘business occupation’ as ‘economist’.
In December 2009, Reeves meanwhile took the unorthodox step of quitting finance altogether by leaving HBOS six months prior to the 2010 election campaign. Candidates would usually secure a sabbatical from their job, meaning they can return to employment should they fail to win.
Naturally, local voters were repeatedly told that she had worked ‘as an economist … at Halifax Bank of Scotland’, using the experience to back up her claim that she had ‘economic expertise’.
After winning the seat, Reeves meanwhile told the Yorkshire Post – in her first interview as an MP – that her work at the Bank of England had included a secondment to the British Embassy in Washington DC as ‘Economic Secretary advising on economic policy’. In fact, her updated LinkedIn CV now concedes that she had a more junior role: ‘second secretary’.
The Post was also told, misleadingly, that she had left the Bank ‘four years ago to become an analyst at HBOS in Leeds’.
Reeves’s supporters insist, of course, that this is all mundane stuff. But there are, it must be said, other claims about Reeves’s past that don’t quite check out.
Several newspaper profiles have described her as some sort of childhood chess prodigy, with one going so far as to suggest she was ‘the British under-14 girls [chess] champion’.
That is, at best, an exaggeration: she was instead a perfectly decent player who, according to official records, came 26th equal in the 1993 British under-14 championships. Her best result, that year, was to come joint fourth in the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship in Ipswich, a less prestigious event in which a mere 28 people under the age of 21 entered.
Despite leading the charge against sleaze on the Tory benches, Reeves was in 2015 one of 19 MPs to have their official credit card suspended by the Parliamentary Standards Authority. She’d apparently run up £4,033.63 in unauthorised spending.
Then came a hideously embarrassing episode last year, when she published a book titled The Women Who Made Modern Economics. It soon emerged that the text, on which she’d worked for 200 hours, according to her Register of interests, in exchange for an £8,200 advance, contained several instances of plagiarism, including passages that had been cut-and-pasted wholesale from Wikipedia. When the FT got wind of this, she described it an ‘inadvertent mistake’.
To some, this speaks to what Tory commentator Henry Newman, a former Whitehall special adviser, dubbed in a radio interview this week a potential ‘honesty problem’. And Downing Street this week refused to comment on suggestions that Reeves might have broken the Ministerial Code, which states: ‘All ministers should act truthfully and behave with honesty.’
To others, it’s merely funny. Internet memes of ‘Rachel from Accounts’ faking personal achievements – some show her taking part in the Moon landings, others winning an Oscar – are now doing the rounds on social media.
More punchlines are being prepared for next week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
So wherever this odd scandal may lead, it has already turned the rather austere Chancellor who claims to be a bad liar into an unlikely figure of fun.