The 45-year-old has the perfect CV for the role, with experience at the Bank of England and in private finance – but how has her background shaped her tough stance on public finances?
’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.
“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.”
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.”
Working in Leeds offered the opportunity to bed down in a more winnable constituency. She was selected for Leeds West before the 2010 general election, which swept Labour out of power but landed her on the backbenches, alongside shell-shocked colleagues. After Labour’s general election defeat in 2015, when Corbyn took over from Miliband and Labour lurched to the left, Reeves chose not to join the frontbench. Instead, she took over as chair of the business select committee, a role in which she is remembered for interrogating bosses at the collapsed outsourcing company Carillion.
Reeves’s team insist the idea did not originate with her. But the end result of this period of internal ferment – during which Starmer reportedly considered resigning – was a ruthless reshuffle that elevated her to the job of shadow chancellor. The pamphlet praised the record of the Blair-Brown governments but said there was a need to break with the “command and control” politics that had characterised Labour’s political economy in the 20th century. Whether this sentiment persists when Reeves takes control of the Treasury – the throbbing heart of command-and-control politics – remains to be seen.
Polanyi, who thought finance should be closely policed, might have been less than impressed at Reeves’s insistence that the sector would remain independent on her watch. Reeves, though, is at ease with big finance. Leeds is one of the UK’s biggest financial centres outside London and she has been a frequent visitor to City boardrooms since becoming shadow chancellor. For the past two years she has shown up at the annual talkfest for the global elite, the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Some new spending on the NHS and education. Pledge to focus on economic growth as a way to boost the coffers
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