At the Labour party conference in Liverpool in 2016, when Ed Balls was strutting his stuff on Strictly, Rachel Reeves was asked what she would do on day one if she became the first female chancellor of the exchequer.
Then in self-imposed exile on the backbenches of Jeremy Corbyn’s party, Reeves nevertheless had an answer to hand. She would fix the UK’s broken childcare system, she said: good for women, good for the economy.
No one present was left in any doubt that Reeves had already imagined being the first woman to take charge of the Treasury. Eight years on, if the polls are right, her long-held ambition is about to be realised.
PPE at Oxford, a stint at the Bank of England as an economist, four years in private-sector banking and a 14-year slog in opposition: for a would-be chancellor, Reeves’s CV could hardly be more perfect.
And few who know the 45-year-old, who was the MP for Leeds West and is standing for re-election in the new Leeds West and Pudsey constituency, have any doubt that she is, as one longtime friend says, “at the top of her game”. But neither do they underestimate the intense pressures that await.
Lifting economic growth is at the heart of Labour’s prospectus – the secret to unlocking much-needed resources to rebuild public services.
That imperative will give Reeves’s Treasury immense power across Whitehall, in a way perhaps not seen since Gordon Brown was in his pomp, but she will also be at the sharp end of ferocious wrangling over resources.
“She’ll face some tricky times in the years ahead,” says David Gauke, the former Treasury minister who has sparred with Reeves across the dispatch box. “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 who have known Reeves since university describe her as confident and serious even then – a former child chess champion who already seemed to be thinking several moves ahead.
“She was a good student; in a good year, probably the best,” recalls Christopher Allsopp, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who taught Reeves at New College, Oxford, where he remains 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.”
Once there, she successfully navigated what one contemporary recalls was an “aggressive” culture, male-dominated and fiercely competitive.
While at the Bank she was posted to Washington, a role that colleagues say she relished. Dame Sue Owen, then Reeves’s boss at the British embassy, recalls: “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 brought the then 23-year-old high-level access to the Federal Reserve, Congress and the White House.
From the Bank, 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 at the management consultancy Capco, who worked alongside her at HBOS and has stayed in touch.
Like everyone 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 young age, Reeves was also applying that analytical brain to politics. One contemporary at the Oxford Labour club recalls that even as a teenager she “just seemed really sorted and feet-on-the-ground”. Politically, they describe her as “pragmatic, rather than having unrealistic ideals or principles”.
The former MP Michael Dugher, who has known Reeves since her teens, 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 brain, in the mould of George Osborne, as well as an economist’s perspective. “She is a political strategist. We have not seen that in No 11 for years.”
Before her spell at HBOS, Reeves had unsuccessfully contested the south London seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, her childhood stomping ground.
Working in Leeds offered the…
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