Rachel Reeves: Britain’s new iron chancellor

Rachel Reeves enters No. 11 Downing Street with a perfect CV for the job and a determination to keep a tight grip on the purse strings. She has the makings of a chancellor of consequence.

Rachel Reeves Delivers First Major Speech As New Chancellor Of The Exchequer
(Image credit: Getty Images)

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

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.