Rachel Reeves is not for turning. She won’t be pushed around, knocked off course, undermined by backbench mutterings or criticism from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The message the chancellor seemingly wants to send this week is that it’s her way or the highway, and if this attempt to stamp her authority on a jittery political moment feels a bit defensive or even impervious to criticism – well, perhaps it’s worth acknowledging that that authority is now being challenged in ways that strangely didn’t happen to her male predecessors.
Is it just a coincidence that the first female chancellor is also the first to be swarmed by a mob of online truthers, flatly refusing to believe the woman they call “Rachel from accounts” was really employed at the Bank of England doing anything senior? (For the record: yes, she really did work there as an economist; no, going on to work for the less prestigious Halifax Bank of Scotland while scouting for a parliamentary seat doesn’t make her a call centre operative; and yes, you absolutely can rip someone’s budget to shreds without getting unnecessarily hysterical about them changing their LinkedIn entry to clarify a job title after being picked up on it by the Guido Fawkes website.) Or is this apparent desperation to believe that a woman in a position of authority must be a jumped-up know-nothing telling us something deeper?
In her 2021 book, The Authority Gap, the journalist Mary Ann Sieghart argued that most people are still hardwired to assume a man probably knows what he’s talking about until proven otherwise, whereas for a woman it’s the other way round. Silly as it is, the kind of nitpicking over her credentials Reeves has experienced is undermining in a way that is hard to explain, but instantly recognisable if you have experienced something similar. It is confidence-sapping, infuriating, hard to counter without sounding rattled or pompous, but mostly just exhausting.
Among Sieghart’s interviewees for the book was Reeves’s favourite role model: not Britain’s iron lady but the US’s Janet Yellen, the first female secretary of the treasury and the first female chair of the Federal Reserve, who admitted that even at the top of her game she still checked and double-checked every detail because she never felt that “it will be assumed that I’m on top of this”. Sadly, she was probably right. An academic research paper entitled Yellin’ at Yellen, analysing 19 years of congressional hearings, found legislators who had scrutinised both her and male Fed chairs had interrupted the only woman more – and questioned her more aggressively.
With her PPE degree from Oxford and six years in central banking, on paper Reeves is, if anything, nerdily overqualified for what is essentially a political strategist’s job as much as an economist’s. Gordon Brown read history and lectured in a further education college before becoming the preeminent chancellor of his generation, and Alistair Darling was a lawyer by training who rescued the nation from a run on the banks. George Osborne read history and dabbled in freelance journalism before making himself indispensable to the Conservative party, and I had to Google Philip Hammond’s credentials for steering Britain through the post-Brexit economic storm because I can’t remember anyone caring at the time (PPE at Oxford, then a business career, if you’re wondering). He had been foreign secretary, he looked and sounded the part: curiosity mostly ended there. But Reeves, apparently, is going to be made to earn the benefit of the doubt. Knowing that even the mildest course correction or retreat is likely to be pounced on by people just dying to say “I told you so”, meanwhile, makes an already high-wire act even more precarious.
The chancellor still exudes confidence about her biggest gamble, the national insurance rise for employers that has riled the CBI: pull on a thread this big and the budget would unravel. But as with Osborne’s pasty tax, it’s the relatively small decisions over which chancellors often sweat the most. The row over taking winter fuel payments away from pensioners on very modest incomes, for example, seems only likely to intensify as the temperature drops. Might tweaking that policy to avoid unintended hardship come to seem in the long run more like strength than weakness?
Whatever their outcome, however, arguments about decisions like these are too important to be clouded by confected nonsense about this particular chancellor’s right to be taking them. Reeves earned this job the hard way, restoring Labour’s credibility on the economy over three years of hard slog. She deserves to be judged now as anyone else would be: not with suspicion at the mere fact of her existence, but on her results.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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