Has ‘economist’ Rachel Reeves been economical with the truth?

Sunday-Monday blog

Hopefully you’ve seen the various articles about how our great Chancellor, Rachel ‘Wrecking-ball’ Reeves, has been reported as having changed her cv on the networking website LinkedIn. She now no longer claims to have been working as an economist when she was employed at HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland)

Perhaps we can shed a bit more light on Wrecking-ball Rachel’s supposedly ‘glittering’ career with a tweet on X. I had better not re-post the tweet here as it is certainly not effusively complimentary about our Rachel’s talents and even, as someone has pointed out, it might be libellous if it is untrue. However, for the curious, here’s the link:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kev-gillett-78323a22_factcheck-facts-activity-7257794402956251138-GLCq

Looking at this change in Reeves’s LinkedIn account and the tweet to which I provide the link above, it would seem that Reeves had somehow gone from being an economist at the Bank of England (BoE) – a pretty important job I would have thought – to working in what may have been a minor administration department at HBOS. That could seem to be a very strange career move as generally people who are good at their jobs move upwards with each job change. Yet Reeves’s move, to what appears to be a rather unimportant administrative position at the Halifax, does look as if it was sideways or even downwards rather than shooting effortlessly up the corporate hierarchy.

Of course, this tweet may be complete nonsense put up by someone with a rather large chip on their shoulder. Or it may be the truth. At the moment we have no way of knowing.

So we have two main possible scenarios:

• Reeves was hugely successful during her years at the BoE and moved onwards and upwards to become an important and influential contributor to HBOS’s success. Incidentally, HBOS collapsed in October 2008 due to excessive risky lending – a time when our Rachel originally claimed on her LinkedIn account that she was an economist at the bank. I suspect that after the HBOS disaster quite a number of staff were ‘let go’ to save money. Coincidentally, that was the time when our Rachel left her employment at HBOS. I wonder what that tells us?
• Reeves didn’t do much at the BoE and left to take up a rather menial administrative job at HBOS. Then, after a few unfortunate episodes concerning confusion/misunderstanding over expenses and time off taken supposedly for dentist and doctor visits but allegedly spent pursuing her political career, was perhaps politely informed (possibly as part of a cost-cutting exercise) that her no doubt considerable talents would be better employed elsewhere.

Here’s the LinkedIn cv of the chap who wrote the piece about Reeves which I link above:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kev-gillett-78323a22/details/experience

I’m no economist, but this whole situation seems somewhat murky to me. Hopefully some investigative journalist will poke around and shed some light on our Rachel’s real work experience and qualifications to be the country’s Chancellor.

And, in case we forget, in October 2024, the Telegraph reported: “A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Ms Reeves, then shadow work and pensions secretary, was one of 19 MPs to have their cards suspended by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) after failing to show spending was genuine. Like her fellow MPs frozen out of their credit, Reeves�s tab was eventually recouped by Ipsa, which refused to pay out valid claims until her debt was settled later that year.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/britain-hands-chancellor-credit-card-suspended

Given the above, some cynics might conclude that Reeves seems to have all the qualities required to be a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer.