A member of Rachel Reeves’ team asks if I can meet the shadow chancellor in Kettering, Northamptonshire, because she wants to provide the Guardian with “original colour”. Lovely! What does the original colour consist of, I ask. “Well, Rachel’s grandparents worked for a shoe factory in Kettering. In fact, Rachel’s grandma’s health was damaged by working with the glue used in laces.” There is one caveat. “Unfortunately, the factory her grandparents worked at doesn’t do visits, but we can take you to a nearby factory.”
There is a second part to the original colour. “Rachel’s grandparents were Salvationists.” Blimey, that sounds exciting, I say – what are those? “They were in the Salvation Army. And, as you probably know, Salvationists are very principled, caring people.”
Keir Starmer’s contenders are even more precisely choreographed than the Blair bunch elected in 1997. Backstory is all-important. Today’s Labour may balk at the phrase “working class” when addressing the nation – “ordinary working people” is preferred – but there is nothing the party loves more than proving its working-class credentials, even if it means skipping a generation or two.
Unfortunately, a train strike prevents us meeting in Kettering on the planned day. I suggest we talk in London, where we both live, but Reeves’ office is reluctant to lose the original colour. Six weeks later, we finally get together in Kettering, at the Joseph Cheaney & Sons factory. Northamptonshire used to be famous for its shoe factories, but there are only a few left.
Reeves follows the two managing directors, Jonathan and William Church, around the factory. The Churches are dashing, well-groomed men who seem popular among their staff. “Hello, I’m Rachel,” she says to each worker we meet, in a gravelly foghorn that retains a hint of south London, where she grew up. But even Reeves struggles to make herself heard here – the radio blasts overhead in a vain attempt to drown out sewing machines that rat-a-tat-tat like gatling guns.
She heads the procession – advisers, the chief executive of the British Footwear Association, a public affairs officer for the Salvation Army and Matt Keane, the Labour leader for Northampton North, all trail in her wake. This visit is being filmed for social media, so Reeves can show her real self to followers.
“How many shoes are made in a day?” she asks one worker.
“Eight hundred to 1,000.”
“Very good. Excellent. Well, really nice to meet you. Take care.”
It feels as safe and superficial as a royal visit. Reeves, 44, does not mention that she hopes to be the country’s next chancellor, nor does she ask how the staff vote or what they think of Labour. Some of the exchanges – particularly with a father and daughter who work opposite each other polishing shoes – come naturally, others less so. She asks one woman who joined recently if she has come here straight from college and the woman gives her a look. When Reeves has moved on, I ask what the look was about. “Well, I’m 37. I’ve hardly come from college, have I?”
Jonathan Church is impressed with Reeves, who worked as an economist at the Bank of England and at the British embassy in Washington DC before winning Leeds West for Labour in 2010. He thinks she would make a credible chancellor – serious, informed and with a previous life outside politics. “I’m not a great fan of career politicians,” he says.
We take a short trip to the Salvation Army church – Reeves is in one car, I’m in another with her friendly advisers. The conversation is more relaxed. They have an ease about them that Reeves lacks.
* * *
The shadow chancellor and I are directed to two chairs in the church hall for the interview. Above us is the pulpit and a sign saying Salvation Army Kettering Corps number 584. In front of us, the Bible is opened at Jeremiah 32, promising the restoration of Jerusalem. I wouldn’t put it past Labour’s spinmeisters to have chosen this text for us.
As we are about to start the interview, the hall door bursts open and in walk her father’s cousin Stuart and his wife, Janet, with family photos and tales of yore. “Oh, hello!” Reeves says, apparently surprised by the stage-managed entrance.
“We’ve got some interesting photos of your dad,” Janet says. They show her pictures of young boys in the brass band. “He wasn’t a happy chappy, because he was at the bottom of the row and Stuart was at the top.”
‘Oh, ha ha ha! Oh, he does look grumpy. Aha ha.” She has a fabulously filthy laugh, quite at odds with her character. Stuart and Reeves’ father, Graham, were very competitive. While Stuart got to play first horn and Graham was only second, Graham was the one who excelled at school, just as Reeves did.
In school holidays, she and her sister, the fellow Labour MP Ellie Reeves (who is married to another Labour MP, John Cryer), would stay in Kettering with their grandparents, visit this church and volunteer in the shop just down the corridor.
Cameos complete, Stuart and Janet disappear. Reeves tells me she learned her values from her grandparents and parents. Although her parents divorced when she was seven, they worked as a team to bring up their daughters. Education was all-important to them, just as it has been to Reeves. “My mum and dad were primary schoolteachers.” They remained teachers throughout? “Yeah!” Teaching throughout? “Oh!” she says. “My dad was a headteacher when I was growing up. He then got a degree in education and started doing stuff for international schools, like curriculum development, lecturing at university and school inspections.” Did her mother stay teaching? “Towards the end of her career, she briefly became a headteacher,” Reeves says.
Reeves and her sister were as bright as they were ambitious. They loved learning. Reeves says education politicised her. Raised in Lewisham and educated in nearby Bromley, she witnessed the impact of the Inner London Education Authority’s abolition in 1990 – the lack of money for books and school-building programmes. “I felt strongly that the government didn’t care about schools and communities like mine and I wanted to do something about it.”
In 1992, her family assumed Neil Kinnock’s Labour would win the general election. But it wasn’t to be. The party was accused of complacency. I have heard that she is terrified of Starmer’s Labour doing a Kinnock at the next election. Reeves pales at the mention of it. “Oh, my goodness, yes, we must make sure this isn’t 92. That is a very real thing. Could it be 92 or 97? And I am a worrier. My natural inclination is to worry about things.”
Really? “Yeah!” she says with a nervous giggle. Why did she go into politics, then? “Yeah, I know!” Now the laugh is more raucous. “A bit late now!”
What does she typically worry about? “At school, I’d constantly worry that I wasn’t going to get the grades I wanted.” Which were? “As.” Sure enough, she got four As at A-level, in double maths, economics and politics. What else did she do besides study? “I am – I was – a geek. I played chess. I was the British girls under-14 champion.”
She and Ellie went to Oxford university – the third and fourth students from their state school to do so. Like so many future politicians, she studied PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). She loved Oxford, but it made her more aware of what true privilege meant. Despite her relatively comfortable upbringing, there were so many clubs and societies she couldn’t afford to join even if she had wanted to. “I remember Ellie coming up in my first year and everybody was dressing up in gowns on Saturday night to go out and she was like: ‘This is ridiculous – why can’t people just go down to the pub?’ It was quite inaccessible for people from ordinary backgrounds.”
By this point, Britain had got its first Labour government since she was three months old, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Blair’s mantra of “Education, education, education” resonated with her. “All of my childhood was under a Conservative government. I was excited by the youth, the vibrancy, the hope that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown offered.” Brown was her hero. “In my first year at university, my college friends bought me a framed picture of Gordon Brown and put it on my desk.” I ask what she has learned from Brown. “For me, his greatest achievements were Bank of England independence, because it gave stability, and the minimum wage, because it lifted people out of poverty.”
Did he teach her the importance of not falling out with the party leader? “Well, that’s a fair point. You probably see Keir and I are very close. We get on very well. I don’t want to be prime minister; I want to be chancellor of the exchequer. That probably helps.” She would never want the job? “I’d never say I’d never do it, because that would be foolish.”
What is the biggest obstacle to victory? “People trusting us with the public finances,” she says, immediately. “It’s so frustrating, because the Tories have destroyed the public finances and family finances, but when we do focus groups with key voters – people who have voted Labour in the past, but have voted Conservative in the last couple of elections – if you ask: ‘What might stop you from voting for Labour?’ it’s: ‘Can we trust you with the money?’ And it’s my responsibility to make sure when people go to the ballot box next year they think: ‘I can trust her with the money.’”
According to the Centre for European Reform, there has been an annual £40bn shortfall in tax revenue because of Brexit – equivalent to 34% of the yearly UK education budget, or 21% of the NHS budget. Although Labour proposes abolishing non-dom tax status (to raise about £3.6bn), ending tax breaks for private schools (£1.7bn) and closing the private equity tax loophole (£500m), that still leaves a shortfall of about £34bn. How would she make it up? “Well, look, we do need to reform our trading relationship with the European Union,” she says. “That is absolutely costing us. The botched Brexit deal is not good enough.”
One of the 10 pledges Starmer made when standing for the Labour leadership was to increase income tax for the top 5% of earners. He subsequently U-turned on most of his pledges, including this one. Has there ever been a better time to increase income tax for the wealthiest? “Look, we do already have the highest tax burden in 70 years, wherever you are in the income distribution. Our focus is more on growing the economy and closing those tax loopholes.” Is that because you don’t want to upset big business? “We do want to build a broad coalition, but our main focus is on what we can do to grow the economy.”
She doesn’t hold back on just how tough things will be if Labour triumphs. “I don’t think any government will have as bad an economic inheritance as we’re going to get if we win the next election. Debt-to-GDP ratio 100%; inflation where it is; interest rates where they are; growth on the floor; wages no higher than they were in 2010.” She insists the route to success is growing the economy via the green prosperity plan, despite her recent announcement that Labour has scaled back plans to borrow £28bn a year to invest in green jobs.
It’s interesting that she talks about trust and building a broad coalition, I say. One of the most common criticisms of the party is that it has become too prescriptive and narrow. Many members on the left have been expelled and been prevented from standing for selection.
Last month, the North of Tyne mayor, Jamie Driscoll, was barred from being the party’s candidate to contest the new and much bigger North East mayoralty after appearing on stage with the leftwing film director Ken Loach (Loach himself was expelled from Labour in 2021 for appearing on a Labour Against the Witchhunt platform way before that organisation was proscribed by the party. The group was formed to campaign against what were seen as politically motivated allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party). This doesn’t sound like a broad coalition, does it? “Look, Keir’s No 1 thing when he became leader was he was going to tear out antisemitism at the roots, and that means there is a zero-tolerance approach.”
I tell her I am Jewish and that I agree with a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism, but the party is so gung-ho that it is now labelling people antisemitic who simply aren’t – and there is a danger of destroying lives in the process.
“Well, look, I’m not on the bodies that make those decisions, so I don’t know the details of that case. But it is so important that we are seen to – and we do – tackle antisemitism. Ken Loach, you might like his films, but his views … well, certainly, they are not ones I share.”
That doesn’t make him antisemitic, I say.
“You don’t think Ken Loach is antisemitic? OK. Well, I think we might have to agree to differ.”
Why does she think he is antisemitic? “Look, I’m not on the bodies that make these decisions, but I think it’s right we have a zero-tolerance approach,” she repeats.
You can’t make such an accusation without supporting it, I say.
“Well, look, I’m not on the body who makes these decisions,” she repeats yet again. Loach later tells me there was no due process in his expulsion: he was just told he was unfit to be a party member; antisemitism wasn’t mentioned.
* * *
The day Reeves and I meet, it is revealed that Thames Water could go bust – and that it has paid out £7.2bn over 32 years in dividends to shareholders, while transforming itself from a debt-free public utility into a private company with debts of £14.3bn. Surely there can be no stronger arguments for state ownership, as Starmer pledged when standing for the leadership?
It’s certainly proof that the model has failed, Reeves says, but this would be the worst possible time to take it back into state ownership. “I don’t think we should start buying these companies from their shareholders after they’ve taken all this money out and spilled all this sewage. They now have a responsibility, through tough regulation, which we would introduce, to fix the problem.”
Why did Labour promise one agenda when Starmer stood for the leadership and then pursue another? “One thing is that the economic situation was very different during that leadership contest. And as you get closer to the election, you’ve got to pull together a manifesto of what is possible during those circumstances.”
I tell her that the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, recently told me that prospective Labour leaders invariably move to the left to win over the membership and then dart to the right to try to win over the country. She laughs and moves on. “Well, Keir asked me when he appointed me shadow chancellor how much it would cost to nationalise all these different companies. I said it would cost tens of billions of pounds. He asked me what impact that would have on bills. I said none: you’d still be buying gas and electricity on global markets. He said: ‘What about if we tax them more?’ I said: ‘Yeah, we could raise a lot of money and use it to help people pay their bills.’ Keir is a pragmatic politician who is driven by what’s the best thing we can do for ordinary working people who are paying these higher bills.”
Wasn’t it irresponsible to make the promise before costing it? Again, the mantra. “Well, obviously, the financial circumstances have changed quite a lot since Keir became leader and things that might have been possible are just not possible now.” Does that mean when you are challenging for the leadership you can promise the world with no intention of delivering? “Well, I’m not sure I’d put it exactly like that, but certainly it’s a different process. Nobody in a leadership contest is asking you to write a manifesto.” But many Labour members regarded Starmer’s 10 pledges “based on the moral case for socialism” as exactly that. That is why they voted for him.
It has been Reeves’ job to dig Starmer out of his predicament – to explain to the country why Labour can’t afford to, or is unprepared to, make good on his early promises. It’s not an enviable task. But she is fully aware that one of the reasons Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, lost so badly in 2019 is that much of the electorate believed he had overpromised.
Perhaps Reeves is the most important member of the shadow cabinet – even more so than Starmer. As she says, the country has to trust her with its cash. And she certainly discusses our finances with the dour gravitas that they deserve. “My role is to make sure everything adds up. Everything we do has to be subject to these rules, otherwise people are going to rightly conclude our sums don’t add up.”
Of course, she says, her sums will leave many people disappointed if Labour gets elected – not least departmental ministers. “There are good Labour things that an incoming Labour government is not going to be able to do quickly, or at all, and I don’t feel great about that. I’d love to be able to say we can put right all of the things that we’ve opposed over the past 13 years under the Conservative government, but if we went into the election with a manifesto like that we wouldn’t be able to do anything, because we wouldn’t win.”
The following day, we catch up on a video call. Reeves says she has just been on a school trip with her children, who are eight and 10. (Her husband, their father, is the senior civil servant Nicholas Joicey, formerly Gordon Brown’s private secretary and speechwriter.) How does she balance work and family life? “We manage it. The reason we’re where we are in south-east London is because we’re near my parents, and we do get help.”
Earlier the same day, Neal Lawson, the director of centre-left thinktank Compass, revealed he had been threatened with expulsion from Labour. The party mined his tweets and discovered that in 2021 he had retweeted a Liberal Democrat MP’s call for some voters to back Green candidates in local elections, saying that the approach represented “grownup, progressive politics”. Lawson had previously criticised Starmer’s Labour for being antidemocratic. Unlike the Labour leader, he supports proportional representation. It now feels as if Labour is suspending or expelling members merely for disagreeing with the leadership. Reeves has far more sympathy for Lawson than for Loach. “I like Neal Lawson,” she tells me. “I think it would be a shame if he wasn’t in the party.”
A lobby journalist who knows Reeves well told me that, although she can appear wooden and humourless in public life, she has a good line in dirty jokes when she is down the pub. I mention it and she looks panic-stricken. “I don’t think so!” she yelps. What is her favourite joke, dirty or otherwise? “This is a moment when I call my children to help me out,” she says. “I don’t know. I’d like to come back to you on that one. In my speeches, sometimes I say: ‘Can I have something to lighten them?’ I had a good little joke in my first conference speech. I said: ‘If Jeff Bezos can afford to fly to space, he can afford to pay his taxes down here on planet Earth – and under Labour he will.’” Silence. “A sort of joke?” Well, it’s a start, I say, but not quite Christmas cracker material.
In 2013, Reeves’ reputation for dreariness was enhanced when the then Newsnight editor, Ian Katz, referred to her as “boring snoring” after she appeared on the show. (He thought he had tweeted a direct message to a friend, but accidentally sent it into the Twittersphere). It was unfortunate and unfair on Reeves. After all, how many of our politicians are truly charismatic without being populist monomaniacs? In any case, charisma is not the prime quality we should look for in an economist.
Nevertheless, she says, the comment hurt her. “Look, I went on television on Newsnight late in the evening. I’d come back early from TUC conference to do it and I was being asked about what Ed Miliband was going to be saying next day at the conference. I think we were talking about zero-hours contracts, which we’re still talking about today. If he thinks that’s boring, that’s up to him. But obviously he didn’t need to send his views to the world. I thought it was rude.”
Does it upset her that, a decade on, people like me are still asking her about it? She swallows deeply. “No, to be honest, I now sort of wear it with a bit of pride.” Boring can be a virtue? “Yes, after the past few years of instability and chaos, a bit of stability and making sure the sums add up and taking care of things would be a good thing. I don’t think I am boring, by the way, for the record, Ian Katz.” But she has never regarded politics as an extension of showbusiness. “If you want someone to do cartwheels and tap dancing, I’m not your person. But if you want someone to run the economy, I’m quite well qualified.”
• This article was amended on 10 and 12 July 2023. A previous version said that, according to the Centre for European Reform, “there has been an annual £40bn tax drop because of Brexit”. To clarify: the CER estimated that UK annual tax revenues would have been around £40bn higher if the country had not left the EU. Also, Rachel Reeves was accompanied by a public affairs officer for the Salvation Army, not the Samaritans.
