On the Labour get together convention in Liverpool in 2016, when Ed Balls was strutting his stuff on Strictly, Rachel Reeves was requested what she would do on day one if she grew to become the primary feminine chancellor of the exchequer.
Then in self-imposed exile on the backbenches of Jeremy Corbyn’s get together, Reeves however had a solution handy. She would repair the UK’s damaged childcare system, she stated: good for girls, good for the economic system.
Nobody current was left in any doubt that Reeves had already imagined being the primary girl to take cost of the Treasury. Eight years on, if the polls are proper, her long-held ambition is about to be realised.
PPE at Oxford, a stint on the Financial institution of England as an economist, 4 years in private-sector banking and a 14-year slog in opposition: for a would-be chancellor, Reeves’s CV may hardly be extra excellent.
And few who know the 45-year-old, who was the MP for Leeds West and is standing for re-election within the new Leeds West and Pudsey constituency, have any doubt that she is, as one longtime buddy says, “at the top of her game”. However neither do they underestimate the extreme pressures that await.
Lifting financial development is on the coronary heart of Labour’s prospectus – the key to unlocking much-needed assets to rebuild public providers.
That crucial will give Reeves’s Treasury immense energy throughout Whitehall, in a means maybe not seen since Gordon Brown was in his pomp, however she will even be on the sharp finish of ferocious wrangling over assets.
“She’ll face some tricky times in the years ahead,” says David Gauke, the previous Treasury minister who has sparred with Reeves throughout the dispatch field. “People will call for more radicalism and higher levels of spending, and she will be a voice of fiscal constraint. And it may well be that in her own party, within a few months, she will not necessarily be that popular.”
Those that have recognized Reeves since college describe her as assured and critical even then – a former little one chess champion who already appeared to be considering a number of strikes forward.
“She was a good student; in a good year, probably the best,” remembers Christopher Allsopp, a former member of the Financial institution of England’s financial coverage committee, who taught Reeves at New School, Oxford, the place he stays an emeritus professor. “I remember talking to her about different things like the Treasury, the Bank of England – and I remember her deciding that she would go for the Bank.”
As soon as there, she efficiently navigated what one up to date remembers was an “aggressive” tradition, male-dominated and fiercely aggressive.
Whereas on the Financial institution she was posted to Washington, a task that colleagues say she relished. Dame Sue Owen, then Reeves’s boss on the British embassy, remembers: “She was quite something; she was obviously very clever, but also very ambitious. She could grasp an argument immediately – but she was also very nice and very sociable.”
The job introduced the then 23-year-old high-level entry to the Federal Reserve, Congress and the White Home.
From the Financial institution, Reeves moved to work for HBOS in Leeds. “I remember discussing with her … She was keen to see what the private sector was all about,” says Paul Riseborough, now director on the administration consultancy Capco, who labored alongside her at HBOS and has stayed in contact.
Like everybody the Guardian spoke to for this piece, he highlighted her sharp intelligence. “She’s got that sort of economist brain; she’s quite good at thinking about the fundamentals. Like, I remember her talking to me once and saying: ‘You know, you need to understand the underlying maths of the problem.’”
From a younger age, Reeves was additionally making use of that analytical mind to politics. One up to date on the Oxford Labour membership remembers that whilst an adolescent she “just seemed really sorted and feet-on-the-ground”. Politically, they describe her as “pragmatic, rather than having unrealistic ideals or principles”.
The previous MP Michael Dugher, who has recognized Reeves since her teenagers, describes her as being from “what used to be described as the traditional right of the party – the old right”, and stresses that she has a political mind, within the mould of George Osborne, in addition to an economist’s perspective. “She is a political strategist. We have not seen that in No 11 for years.”
Earlier than her spell at HBOS, Reeves had unsuccessfully contested the south London seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, her childhood stomping floor.
Working in Leeds supplied the chance to mattress down in a extra winnable constituency. She was chosen for Leeds West earlier than the 2010 normal election, which swept Labour out of energy however landed her on the backbenches, alongside shell-shocked colleagues.
Fellow newbies within the 2010 consumption recall Reeves’s uncommon self-confidence: the sense that she arrived already realizing how Westminster labored.
One shadow cupboard colleague means that was partly as a result of Reeves roots herself in a stable custom of Labour ladies. She wrote a ebook in regards to the postwar Leeds MP Alice Bacon and pressed for the publication of a long-forgotten novel, The Division Bell Thriller, written by one other pioneering MP, Ellen Wilkinson.
Reeves supported Ed Miliband for the management, to the shock of fellow travellers on the appropriate of the get together. “He’s decent and clever, and those are qualities that she admires,” stated one longtime buddy.
After Labour’s normal election defeat in 2015, when Corbyn took over from Miliband and Labour lurched to the left, Reeves selected to not be a part of the frontbench. As an alternative, she took over as chair of the enterprise choose committee, a task wherein she is remembered for interrogating bosses on the collapsed outsourcing firm Carillion.
Associates say she struggled with the path Labour had taken, however by no means thought-about abandoning ship like colleagues together with Chuka Umunna, one other 2010-intake Labour MP, who left to kind the doomed get together Change UK. “She just has this inner steel,” remembers one colleague.
Married to a senior civil servant, Nick Joicey, Reeves has two kids, about whom she is fiercely non-public. She is near her youthful sister, Ellie, who joined her in Westminster in 2017 because the MP for Lewisham West and Penge.
Reeves was not Keir Starmer’s first selection of shadow chancellor when he gained the management 4 years in the past. The function initially went to the much less overtly political Anneliese Dodds, whom Starmer thought to be a rising star.
A 12 months later, after the humiliating lack of the Hartlepool byelection, which many learn as proof that Starmer was failing to show his get together’s fortunes round, some on Labour’s proper believed he needed to go. And a few of these have been touting Reeves instead chief.
Reeves’s group insist the concept didn’t originate along with her. However the finish results of this era of inside ferment – throughout which Starmer reportedly thought-about resigning – was a ruthless reshuffle that elevated her to the job of shadow chancellor.
Since then, Reeves has turn out to be the driving power behind Starmer’s challenge of successful public confidence: courting companies, pledging iron fiscal self-discipline, and laying out a sequence of reforms that she hopes will rekindle development.
Reeves carries little ideological baggage. Not like Brown, who borrowed closely from the US expertise within the run-up to the 1997 election, the present shadow chancellor travels gentle. Some, although, have in contrast her to Anthony Crosland, whose 1956 ebook, The Way forward for Socialism, stated Labour ought to focus extra on modernising and reforming the economic system than on nationalisation and state management.
When she revealed a pamphlet, The On a regular basis Economic system, in 2018, she was within the political wilderness after refusing to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cupboard. Her insistence that Labour wanted to consider tips on how to create wealth in addition to tips on how to spend it was a transparent try to distance herself from the get together management – and straight from the Crosland playbook.
The pamphlet praised the file of the Blair-Brown governments however stated there was a necessity to interrupt with the “command and control” politics that had characterised Labour’s political economic system within the twentieth century. Whether or not this sentiment persists when Reeves takes management of the Treasury – the throbbing coronary heart of command-and-control politics – stays to be seen.
Some Labour insiders complain that Reeves’s modus operandi so far as her personal group is anxious is very centralised, and that every part is routed by means of her in a means that may clog up decision-making.
Six years on from the launch of The On a regular basis Economic system, Reeves was on the Bayes Enterprise Faculty within the Metropolis of London to ship the Mais lecture. Chancellors and potential chancellors have a tendency to make use of this gathering to indicate how effectively learn they’re and to flesh out their financial considering. After name-checking the economists Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson, Reeves used the event to suggest her personal resolution to Britain’s financial woes: securonomics.
She stated Britain wanted sooner development and there have been three pre-conditions for reaching it: stability, funding and reform. “Let me be unambiguous: there is no viable growth strategy today which does not rest upon resilience for our national economy and security for working people,” she stated.
Britain, she stated, was residing in an age of insecurity, and the reply was not the large state however the good and strategic state.
Polanyi, who thought finance must be intently policed, might need been lower than impressed at Reeves’s insistence that the sector would stay impartial on her watch. Reeves, although, is relaxed with large finance. Leeds is likely one of the UK’s largest monetary centres outdoors London and she or he has been a frequent customer to Metropolis boardrooms since changing into shadow chancellor. For the previous two years she has proven up on the annual talkfest for the worldwide elite, the World Financial Discussion board in Davos.
She has been fundraising assiduously, too: the Labour peer David Sainsbury has donated greater than £100,000 over the previous 12 months to pay for a member of workers in Reeves’s workplace. One other £64,000 got here from Gary Lubner, the previous boss of Autoglass.
Reeves’s appearances on the prawn cocktail circuit and within the Swiss Alps highlights two fears: the danger that an incoming Labour authorities will probably be blown out of the water by the monetary markets, and the sense that the Tories have a means of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Manifesto comparability
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tax and economic system
The latter concern is especially acute. Reeves’s mantra that Labour’s robust stance on the general public funds is “non-negotiable” is partly for the advantage of the Metropolis however primarily meant as reassurance to voters.
Her message that “stability is change” seems to have paid off. The Tories have tried to combat the election on the idea of Labour’s £2,000 “tax bombshell”, however Reeves insistence on a pared-down, totally costed manifesto has blunted that assault.
It hasn’t come with out inside tensions. Some Labour advisers consult with Reeves and her Treasury group because the U-boat as a result of “they stay submerged, they torpedo everyone else’s ideas, and then they slink off underwater and everyone else is left to pick up the survivors”.
With simply days earlier than she probably walks into No 11, the query even some shadow cupboard colleagues battle to reply is whether or not this studiedly cautious method marks the restrict of Reeves’s ambition for what Labour can obtain in authorities – and what occurs if the hoped-for resurgence in development fails to materialise.
“I think she starts with a lot of political capital, but she’s also going to need a lot of luck,” says Gauke. “If she gets that luck then she’s very well positioned to be a powerful, consequential chancellor of the exchequer.”
