Was Rachel Reeves fired from both her jobs?

Wednesday-Thursday blog

I’m afraid it’s a bit of a long one today. But I have a feeling that her dodgy-dossier CV isn’t the only troubling issue around the past of Britain’s greatest ever female Chancellor.

Reeves’s place at New College Oxford University – was Reeves admitted at New College due to her academic achievements or was she helped by her Labour activism, in particular her friendship with Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown? In an interview Rachel Reeves recounted: ‘In my first year at university my college friends bought me a framed picture of Gordon Brown and put it on my desk’. Rachel Reeves’s tutor at Oxford University was Chris Allsopp. Possibly her tutor would have been involved in the initial decision to offer Reeves a place at Oxford. Gordon Brown seems to have had some form of relationship with Chris Allsopp as in 2000 Gordon Brown appointed Chris Allsopp to the BoE Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). At the time this appointment was criticised by the press, the Treasury Select Committee and even fellow Labour MPs. Labour MP Brian Sedgemore for example, remarked: ‘Replacing Charles Goodhart with Mr Allsopp was like substituting a player from Arsenal or Manchester United with one from the Vauxhall league, maybe Kidderminster’. The Treasury Select Committee called for Brown to ‘;think again about his appointment of Mr Christopher Allsopp’. Brown’s response, via the Treasury, was: ‘The appointments to the MPC are a matter for the Chancellor’.

Reeves’s BoE job – did Rachel Reeves get her very hard-to-achieve graduate job at the BoE on her own merit? Or did her political connections, in particular her links with Chancellor Gordon Brown help her land the highly sought-after BoE job? The BoE employs students from a wide variety of disciplines. But to follow the economist track at the BoE usually requires a degree in intellectually-challenging subjects like pure economics or mathematics rather than the much less academically-rigorous PPE which Reeves (and so many other aspiring politicians) took. Though after her Oxford PPE, Reeves did a Masters in Economics at the LSE (London School of Economics). The LSE is well-known for being rabidly left-wing/socialist. The LSE was founded in 1895 by members of the Fabian Society—specifically Sidney and Beatrice Webb—who advocated for advancing socialist causes and social reform. So, a cynic might wonder if Reeves actually learnt anything about real economics there or was it all about mouth-frothing, Marxist, Lenin-adoring, Stalin-glorifying, tax-the-rich anti-capitalist politics?

Reeves campaigning in 2005 – Rachel Reeves seems to have had a bit of a charmed life at the BoE. About 16 months after returning from Washington, she was apparently given time off to campaign to become the Labour MP for Bromley in the 2005 general election. An important backer who campaigned with her was the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Rachel Reeves may have been quite close to the Straw family as Jack Straw’s son, Will Straw, studied PPE at New College Oxford at the same time as Reeves even though he was caught trying to deal cannabis just a year before going up to Oxford. Despite Straw’s support, Reeves lost in this strongly Conservative constituency:

Reasons for leaving the BoE – when interviewed about Reeves’s progression to becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer, her former tutor at Oxford described her as ‘a good student; in a good year, probably the best’. But if Reeves was such an economics superstar, why would the BoE have allowed such a valuable employee to leave? And why would such a talented economist want to leave the BoE to take up an administrative position at a retail bank’s regional office, rather far from the centre of the economics action? Very curious?

Reeves’s HBOS job – How did Rachel Reeves get her job at HBOS? Was it because HBOS felt that an economist from the BoE was the perfect person to fill an administrative position at their Leeds office? Or was it because a prominent figure in the Labour movement, who had previously been Chair of Labour Party Students which Reeves had joined around 1995, was a director at HBOS and got Reeves her job? Did Reeves later return the favour by appointing this person as a Director at the Treasury in July 2014?

Leaving HBOS – a person who has put a post on Twitter, which (I believe) has since been removed, wrote that they had been a manager at HBOS several levels above Reeves. This person claimed that there had been several problems with Reeves’s contribution to the bank. One was the claim that a few managers including Reeves had been caught signing off each others’ expenses inappropriately. Another claim was that Reeves took an unusual amount of time off for supposed dentist and doctors’ appointments, that she was followed to one of these and it was found that she was actually engaged in Labour Party activities. Are these claims true? Or are they just spiteful inventions? Why did Reeves leave her job at HBOS? Was it to pursue opportunities elsewhere? Was it because she was asked to resign due to her unprofessional behaviour? Or was it because she was one of the many thousands of staff made redundant following the HBOS collapse as her employers felt that her particular talents would not be necessary for the bank’s future?

Economic illiteracy – Reeves declined to serve in the cabinet when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, bravely declaring that his and shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s policies were ‘economically illiterate’. In January 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves was given a stern warning by ex Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell not to impose big welfare cuts to head off the economic crisis. Leading Left wing MP Mr McDonnell said such a move would be ‘politically suicidal’ and would result in a backlash from hard-up voters and trigger a recession, Is McDonnell ‘economically illiterate’ as Reeves claimed? Or is it Reeves who is ‘economically illiterate’? Or, as Britain collapses into a recessionary doom loop due to Reeves’s tax-tax-tax budget from h*ll, could it be both of them?