Why is Rachel Reeves accused of ‘lying’ on her CV?

Britain’s first female chancellor is accused of embellishing her prior career achievements on LinkedIn, as Sean O’Grady explains

Among her challenges, chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has been accused of “lying” about her CV. The basic facts of her rise to power are not in question; she is neither an imposter nor a fantasist, and the allegations from Tory circles of “incredibly serious” fraud look exaggerated at best.

However, some parts of her CV published on LinkedIn have been amended, apparently by her, and various remarks about her economic credentials may have overstated her experience and achievements. For a politician who makes much of her opponents’ duplicity, that’s not a good look. The hostile reaction to her Budget has inevitably put her under an unusually intense degree of scrutiny.

What’s the problem?

“Lying” – at least according to one lobby journalist who put that accusation, bluntly, to the prime minister’s spokesperson. Former Conservative Party chair Richard Holden (who seems not to realise the general election is over) has written to the chancellor, stating: “The allegations that your CV might not be accurate are incredibly serious and would raise significant concerns about your ability to be honest with the British public, concerns which your Budget has already raised.”

About what exactly?

There are a few issues. The most recent is a question over which junior girls’ chess championship Reeves won when she was about 14. In one profile, apparently on the basis of her (unsworn) testimony, it states that was “the British under-14 girls [Chess] champion”; in fact, according to underemployed Tory campaigner Henry Newman, “she came 26th equal out of 34 or so”. This is not to be confused with Reeves’s triumph as joint-winner (with three others) of the “British Women’s Association Girls’ Championships” which Newman suggests is “a much smaller competition”. Either way, it probably won’t qualify for the description “Chessgate” and an apology to the Commons seems unnecessary.

A bit more substantively, Reeves sometimes gave the impression she spent longer as a Bank of England economist than she actually had – “a decade” versus “the best part of a decade”. In fact, she was in the graduate trainee scheme (quite hard to join, to be fair) and survived in the Bank’s austere intellectual atmosphere from September 2000 to December 2006 – six years, four months. Of that, a year was spent studying for a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, and some 18 months seconded to the British embassy in Washington, both excellent training for a prospective central bank executive or, as it turns out, chancellor.

After press reports about her time in the private sector, Reeves herself revised the description of her time at HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) Group in 2006-09 from “Economist, Bank of Scotland” to “Retail Banking, Halifax”. That’s now said to be a misrepresentation of her actual activities “running a small administrative complaints department that also dealt with IT matters”.

Is Reeves a plagiarist?

This accusation cropped up again at Prime Minister’s Questions last week, when Kemi Badenoch called her a “copy-and-paste chancellor”, reviving older claims that a book she authored on prominent female economists had some sections directly lifted from Wikipedia. She took responsibility for that but blamed the researchers. That sloppy episode hasn’t helped in the latest micro-crisis about her personal history.

So is Reeves an economist or not?

Yes. She’s got a respectable upper second-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Oxford, which can be a more exacting course than is sometimes suggested, as well as her master’s from the LSE, plus what she picked up at the Bank of England and in her time as a shadow and actual minister. Undoubtedly, that would have helped her understand the importance of, say, sound public finances, investment and rising productivity.

The problem is that in opposition, she seemed to think her economic background and knowledge, which is real enough, placed her in some sort of guru-like position to solve Britain’s economic problems. History tells us that some of our most economically literate politicians, most spectacularly the award-winning scholar Harold Wilson, have been no more successful in practical policy terms than those with little or no training, such as Ken Clarke. Brains aren’t everything.

Does it matter?

No. There’d be none of this stuff about Reeves’s employment history if the Budget had landed better and farmers and businesses had not gone to war with the government. Reeves’s “lies” are no more than burnishing her CV and being a little boastful. It is true that the prime minister would probably prefer not to be troubled with queries about his chancellor’s precocious achievements in the world of chess, or her job at the Halifax two decades ago, but the pair are in this together and have much bigger questions to answer.