Was Rachel Reeves fired from the only two proper jobs she had?

Sunday/Monday blog

Obviously readers will be well aware of the rather uncomfortable questions which have been raised about what work experience our excellent Chancellor, the ‘Right Honourable’ Rachel Reeves, actually had. I have no insight into the truth of what Rachel from Accounts actually did before becoming a revered politician. Hopefully, over the next few months, some people who worked alongside Rachel ‘the economist’ Reeves, will provide some clarity.

So what can I add to this issue? In what might be optimistically called ‘my career’, I worked in almost 100 organisations in 15 countries. As part of and then a leader of an A&D Team (Analysis and Design) my job was to look at how organisations operated, what information they used for decision-making and how organisational effectiveness could be improved.

When you’ve worked in so many organisations in so many different countries, you start to get what the Germans in their melodic language call Fingerspitzengef�hl – a feeling for what is really going on. And my Fingerspitzengef�hl makes me suspect that Rachel Reeves was politely let go (fired) from the only two proper jobs she has ever had.

Let’s start at her period at the Bank of England (BoE). Our Rachel was there from 2000 to 2006. If Rachel from Accounts had been enormously successful at the BoE, I’ve no doubt that subtle, and possibly even unsubtle, messages would have been conveyed to Rachel that she was highly regarded by her superiors and was destined for greater things. However, if Rachel Reeves was seen as a largerly-useless, lower-level financial analyst with little to no future, the messages would have been rather different. There’s no way Rachel would have been called into a room and an Alan Sugar-like figure would have pointed a finger at her and said: “You’re fired”. That’s not how things are done in a traditional public-sector organisation like the BoE. Instead subtle messages would have reached Rachel that she might be happier applying her considerable talents elsewhere. Moreover, she would have been given to understand that if she went quietly, she would be given an excellent reference.

Next Rachel moved to Halifax/Bank of Scotland (HBOS). She was there from 2006 to 2009. There is some confusion whether Rachel worked at the Bank of Scotland as an economist or whether she actually worked at the Halifax in a rather more menial customer services department as suggested by the excellent Guido Fawkes website:

If I remember correctly, HBOS collapsed in the 2008 banking crisis having loaned rather a lot of money to people who could never pay this money back and Gordon Brown approved for the failed HBOS to be taken over by the Lloyds banking group. I would expect that following the HBOS collapse and Lloyds takeover there was a fair amount of cost-cutting at HBOS – getting rid of people who were not considered as being essential to the bank’s future success. Possibly that coincided with our Rachel’s departure for the more lucrative field of politics as it has been suggested by unkind voices that inordinate numbers of our Rachel’s doctors and dentist appointments while at the Halifax were actually used to further her ‘work’ as a Labour councillor thus laying the groundwork for her move into politics full-time.

Of course, I realise there are many reasons why people change jobs. Career advancement is is just one of those reasons. Nevertheless, looking at Rachel Reeves’s ‘career progression’ from being an economist at the BoE to an as yet unclear role at the Halifax, one might get the feeling that we are not looking at a financial star’s rapid rise to glory. In fact, there’s a whiff of someone who was possibly politely let go by the only two major organisations which have employed her.

Given that Reeves is now wrecking much of the British economy while hosing our money onto her chums in the worthless, skive-from-home, don’t-know-what-work-is, inefficient, incompetent public sector, it’s important we get some clarity on our Rachel’s real talents and experience. Perhaps the excellent, ever-reliable BBC Verify could shed some light on what appears to me to be a confusing situation?