Rachel Reeves: Britain’s new iron chancellor

As elated Labour activists arrived at the Tate Modern for their victory party, they were each given a token to exchange for a beer or a glass of wine. The parsimony didn’t escape notice. As someone there joked: “It’s Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules in action already”. The new chancellor’s mantra that Labour’s tough stance on public finances is “non-negotiable” will give her Treasury immense power in Whitehall, says The Guardian, “in a way perhaps not seen since Gordon Brown was in his pomp”.

How Rachel Reeves became an MP

At 45, Reeves appears to have the perfect CV for the role – and perhaps the right temperament too, notes a BBC profile. Often described as “serious” and “determined”, she combines a love of mathematical discipline with a chess player’s ability to think several moves ahead and a determination to fight injustice. All three traits were evident early in life. Born in Lewisham, south London, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, her parents were Labour-supporting primary school teachers; her grandparents, Salvationist factory workers from Kettering, says Bloomberg.

Reeves came into her own intellectually at Oxford in the late 1990s where she read PPE and was described by her tutor at New College, Christopher Allsopp, a former member of the Bank of England’s (BoE) Monetary Policy Committee, as “a good student; in a good year, probably the best”. Reeves’ own path into monetary policy seemed already certain. While her friends gave her a framed photo of Gordon Brown to hang in her room, Allsopp recalls her deciding that she would “go for the Bank” – reportedly turning down a lucrative job offer from Goldman Sachs to do something “a bit more useful”. She worked for six years as a BoE economist in the boom years leading up to the financial crisis – including a stint on secondment to Washington, where she met her civil servant husband, Nick Joicey (a speech writer for Brown), and gained “high-level access to the Federal Reserve and Congress”. On return to Britain, Reeves combined her long-held parliamentary ambitions (contesting a safe Tory seat in 2005) with an eye-opening stint at HBOS in Leeds on the eve of the bank’s collapse.

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By the time she was elected MP for Leeds West and Pudsey in 2010, Reeves was already considered “a rising star” and joined Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, eventually taking charge of the work and pensions portfolio, says Bloomberg. Fourteen years in opposition honed her, but the party’s vicious internal wranglings made for a bruising time. Reeves declined to serve in the cabinet when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, bravely declaring that his and shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s policies were “economically illiterate”. As a backbencher, she chaired the Commons Business Select Committee and led the probe into the collapse of the giant outsourcer Carillion, which she later described as “formative”. She made equally good use of her time in the “political wilderness” to develop her own economic ideas.

What's next for the chancellor?

A pragmatist by nature, “Reeves carries little ideological baggage” – as evidenced by the emphasis she placed on “securonomics” (a response to an increasingly fractured global economy) as Keir Starmer’s shadow chancellor, her regular appearances at Davos, and her “smoked salmon and scrambled egg” wooing of City financiers. Her decision to “go for growth” carries cross-party support, says The Economist. Even so, there may be storms ahead as Reeves rounds out Labour’s “remarkably slim” manifesto. Reeves has the makings of becoming “a powerful” chancellor of consequence, says an old Tory sparring partner, David Gauke. “She starts with a lot of political capital, but she’s also going to need a lot of luck.”

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