The first woman to lead the UK’s finances in 800 years, she is an economist Rachel Reeves Shows a special interest in breaking taboos.
Raised in south London in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s, Rachel, who was educated at public schools, prided herself on beating all her rivals – mostly boys who attended fee-paying schools – in local chess tournaments. “There was a lot of arrogance,” she recalled years later. “I was as good as them and I was going to prove it.”
It was this campaign that moved Reeves, 45, from a primary school in Beckenham to 11 Downing Street (the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s residence), to become the first woman to take charge of the British economy after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the general election last Thursday (5).
She inherits from the outgoing governors a slow-growing economy, debt approaching 100 percent of GDP and the highest tax burden in 70 years. “I have no illusions about the scale of the challenge I’m inheriting,” Reeves said. BBC In an interview shortly after the campaign began, he said, “We have to make tough decisions.”
The new minister knows that some of her positions will be popular, especially with the Labour left. After years of austerity policies, some activists want to see her ease monetary policy and pump money into Britain’s struggling public services.
Instead, Reeves and Labour leader Keir Starmer have spent the past three years trying to reassure businesses and financial markets that the party has evolved since the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (2015-20) and will not return to the taxes and spending traditionally associated with the party.
The couple ruled out raising income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax – the Treasury’s four main sources of revenue. They said none of their plans called for any other tax increases, and promised to stick to fiscal rules, ensuring debt falls over time. “My first commitment is to stabilise the economy,” Reeves told the BBC.
Reeves’ affinity for numbers began early. Born in Lewisham, south London, in 1979, the daughter of a teacher, she attended a local public school, where she was “obsessed” and would give her younger sister, now Labour politician Ellie Reeves, extra maths homework. She won her first chess championship at the age of seven and became national champion at 14.
The poor physical condition of some areas of her school – which had some prefabricated shacks – was an early impetus for her politics, and although her role in government is to manage the country’s finances, she said the area of government she deals with is more concerned with education.
Labour has been in Reeves’s family for generations: when she was young, her father pointed to the former party leader Neil Kinnock on television and told her: “This is what we voted for.” His grandparents were Salvationists who moved to Kettering, central England, in the 1930s to find work in a factory. Reeves spoke of his grandmother’s respiratory problems as a result of inhaling glue while making shoelaces.
“The Labour Party was formed by people like them and for people like them,” he said of his grandparents’ struggles. “It should be the voice of those people.” Reeves joined the party when he was 17.
The future chancellor’s efforts at school paid off with exam results that secured her a place at Oxford University, where she studied politics, philosophy and economics, a course that has launched the careers of many British politicians, including three Conservative prime ministers in the past decade: David Cameron, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
After graduating in 2000, Reeves received a job offer from Goldman Sachs. Instead, she chose to work at the Bank of England, later saying she turned down an offer of more money to do something “a little more useful.”
Reeves worked for six years as an economist at the Bank of England in the expansion period leading up to the financial crisis, including a secondment to the British embassy in Washington, where she met her husband, Nick Joyce, a senior civil servant who also worked as a speechwriter for Gordon Brown when he was chancellor. The couple have two children.
Opposition times
At the 2005 election, Reeves stood for Labour in the safe Conservative seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, coming a distant second. She stood there again in a by-election a year later, coming fourth. She then moved to Leeds, where she took a job at banking giant HBOS shortly before its collapse in 2008, leading to its takeover by Lloyds Banking.
Regarded as a rising Labour star even before he entered Parliament, Reeves finally achieved political success in 2010, winning the Leeds West Wing for Labour just as the party lost government.
In 2013, she made headlines after a journalist accidentally tweeted that she was “boring and snoring” in an interview. She later told The Guardian that she felt “insulted” and that being able to “crunch numbers” was more important in her job than showing “a great sense of humour or great intelligence”.
Reeves described the opposition period from 2010 to 2015 as a “whirlwind” of rhetoric and political intervention, and until the night of the 2015 general election, she and her colleagues believed they were heading for government. The subsequent defeat marked it out, contributing to a more cautious Labour strategy in the run-up to election day, as party leaders tried to avoid giving their opponents a chance.
When Corbyn was elected Labour leader, Reeves, a moderate in the party, returned to the backbenches, making clear that she would not serve on his team. She used her time to write economic pamphlets and a book on women in Westminster, and chaired the business select committee.
In that role, she led an inquiry into the collapse of Carillion, which left thousands of people out of work, hit the pensions of tens of thousands more and forced the government to step in with emergency funding to save contracts affecting schools, hospitals, universities, roads and military installations. Reeves described the inquiry as “the most politically formative period” of his life.
After two election defeats, Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader in 2020, and Reeves returned to a supportive cabinet, initially as a cabinet minister, before winning promotion to chancellor in 2021.
Since then, her goal has been to restore confidence in the party’s economic approach, including courting businesses with its signature breakfasts of salmon and scrambled eggs. She often reminds colleagues that Labour only won elections when it did better than the Conservatives on economic credibility.
The former children’s chess champion has spent her life trying to prove people wrong, and now she is counting on growth to pursue Labour’s priorities.
“We’re not going to be able to fix everything the Conservatives have done straight away,” she told the BBC, adding that she wanted to “transform this economy so that it actually works for the workers of our country again.”
