At the Labour party conference in Liverpool in 2016, when Ed Balls was strutting his stuff on Strictly, Rachel Reeves was asked what she would do on day one if she became the first female chancellor of the exchequer.
Then in self-imposed exile on the backbenches of Jeremy Corbyn’s party, Reeves nevertheless had an answer to hand. She would fix the UK’s broken childcare system, she said: good for women, good for the economy.
No one present was left in any doubt that Reeves had already imagined being the first woman to take charge of the Treasury. Eight years on, if the polls are right, her long-held ambition is about to be realised.
PPE at Oxford, a stint at the Bank of England as an economist, four years in private-sector banking and a 14-year slog in opposition: for a would-be chancellor, Reeves’s CV could hardly be more perfect.
And few who know the 45-year-old, who was the MP for Leeds West and is standing for re-election in the new Leeds West and Pudsey constituency, have any doubt that she is, as one longtime friend says, “at the top of her game”. But neither do they underestimate the intense pressures that await.
Lifting economic growth is at the heart of Labour’s prospectus – the secret to unlocking much-needed resources to rebuild public services.
That imperative will give Reeves’s Treasury immense power across Whitehall, in a way perhaps not seen since Gordon Brown was in his pomp, but she will also be at the sharp end of ferocious wrangling over resources.
“She’ll face some tricky times in the years ahead,” says David Gauke, the former Treasury minister who has sparred with Reeves across the dispatch box. “People will call for more radicalism and higher levels of spending, and she will be a voice of fiscal constraint. And it may well be that in her own party, within a few months, she will not necessarily be that popular.”
Those who have known Reeves since university describe her as confident and serious even then – a former child chess champion who already seemed to be thinking several moves ahead.
“She was a good student; in a good year, probably the best,” recalls Christopher Allsopp, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who taught Reeves at New College, Oxford, where he remains an emeritus professor. “I remember talking to her about different things like the Treasury, the Bank of England – and I remember her deciding that she would go for the Bank.”
Once there, she successfully navigated what one contemporary recalls was an “aggressive” culture, male-dominated and fiercely competitive.
While at the Bank she was posted to Washington, a role that colleagues say she relished. Dame Sue Owen, then Reeves’s boss at the British embassy, recalls: “She was quite something; she was obviously very clever, but also very ambitious. She could grasp an argument immediately – but she was also very nice and very sociable.”
The job brought the then 23-year-old high-level access to the Federal Reserve, Congress and the White House.
From the Bank, Reeves moved to work for HBOS in Leeds. “I remember discussing with her … She was keen to see what the private sector was all about,” says Paul Riseborough, now director at the management consultancy Capco, who worked alongside her at HBOS and has stayed in touch.
Like everyone the Guardian spoke to for this piece, he highlighted her sharp intelligence. “She’s got that sort of economist brain; she’s quite good at thinking about the fundamentals. Like, I remember her talking to me once and saying: ‘You know, you need to understand the underlying maths of the problem.’”
From a young age, Reeves was also applying that analytical brain to politics. One contemporary at the Oxford Labour club recalls that even as a teenager she “just seemed really sorted and feet-on-the-ground”. Politically, they describe her as “pragmatic, rather than having unrealistic ideals or principles”.
The former MP Michael Dugher, who has known Reeves since her teens, describes her as being from “what used to be described as the traditional right of the party – the old right”, and stresses that she has a political brain, in the mould of George Osborne, as well as an economist’s perspective. “She is a political strategist. We have not seen that in No 11 for years.”
Before her spell at HBOS, Reeves had unsuccessfully contested the south London seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, her childhood stomping ground.
Working in Leeds offered the opportunity to bed down in a more winnable constituency. She was selected for Leeds West before the 2010 general election, which swept Labour out of power but landed her on the backbenches, alongside shell-shocked colleagues.
Fellow newbies in the 2010 intake recall Reeves’s rare self-confidence: the sense that she arrived already knowing how Westminster worked.
One shadow cabinet colleague suggests that was partly because Reeves roots herself in a solid tradition of Labour women. She wrote a book about the postwar Leeds MP Alice Bacon and pressed for the publication of a long-forgotten novel, The Division Bell Mystery, written by another pioneering MP, Ellen Wilkinson.
Reeves supported Ed Miliband for the leadership, to the surprise of fellow travellers on the right of the party. “He’s decent and clever, and those are qualities that she admires,” said one longtime friend.
After Labour’s general election defeat in 2015, when Corbyn took over from Miliband and Labour lurched to the left, Reeves chose not to join the frontbench. Instead, she took over as chair of the business select committee, a role in which she is remembered for interrogating bosses at the collapsed outsourcing company Carillion.
Friends say she struggled with the direction Labour had taken, but never considered abandoning ship like colleagues including Chuka Umunna, another 2010-intake Labour MP, who left to form the doomed party Change UK. “She just has this inner steel,” recalls one colleague.
Married to a senior civil servant, Nick Joicey, Reeves has two children, about whom she is fiercely private. She is close to her younger sister, Ellie, who joined her in Westminster in 2017 as the MP for Lewisham West and Penge.
Reeves was not Keir Starmer’s first choice of shadow chancellor when he won the leadership four years ago. The role initially went to the less overtly political Anneliese Dodds, whom Starmer regarded as a rising star.
A year later, after the humiliating loss of the Hartlepool byelection, which many read as evidence that Starmer was failing to turn his party’s fortunes around, some on Labour’s right believed he had to go. And some of those were touting Reeves as an alternative leader.
Reeves’s team insist the idea did not originate with her. But the end result of this period of internal ferment – during which Starmer reportedly considered resigning – was a ruthless reshuffle that elevated her to the job of shadow chancellor.
Since then, Reeves has become the driving force behind Starmer’s project of winning public confidence: courting businesses, pledging iron fiscal discipline, and laying out a series of reforms that she hopes will rekindle growth.
Reeves carries little ideological baggage. Unlike Brown, who borrowed heavily from the US experience in the run-up to the 1997 election, the current shadow chancellor travels light. Some, though, have compared her to Anthony Crosland, whose 1956 book, The Future of Socialism, said Labour should concentrate more on modernising and reforming the economy than on nationalisation and state control.
When she published a pamphlet, The Everyday Economy, in 2018, she was in the political wilderness after refusing to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Her insistence that Labour needed to think about how to create wealth as well as how to spend it was a clear attempt to distance herself from the party leadership – and straight from the Crosland playbook.
The pamphlet praised the record of the Blair-Brown governments but said there was a need to break with the “command and control” politics that had characterised Labour’s political economy in the 20th century. Whether this sentiment persists when Reeves takes control of the Treasury – the throbbing heart of command-and-control politics – remains to be seen.
Some Labour insiders complain that Reeves’s modus operandi as far as her own team is concerned is highly centralised, and that everything is routed through her in a way that can clog up decision-making.
Six years on from the launch of The Everyday Economy, Reeves was at the Bayes Business School in the City of London to deliver the Mais lecture. Chancellors and prospective chancellors tend to use this gathering to show how well read they are and to flesh out their economic thinking. After name-checking the economists Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson, Reeves used the occasion to propose her own solution to Britain’s economic woes: securonomics.
She said Britain needed faster growth and there were three pre-conditions for achieving it: stability, investment and reform. “Let me be unambiguous: there is no viable growth strategy today which does not rest upon resilience for our national economy and security for working people,” she said.
Britain, she said, was living in an age of insecurity, and the answer was not the big state but the smart and strategic state.
Polanyi, who thought finance should be closely policed, might have been less than impressed at Reeves’s insistence that the sector would remain independent on her watch. Reeves, though, is at ease with big finance. Leeds is one of the UK’s biggest financial centres outside London and she has been a frequent visitor to City boardrooms since becoming shadow chancellor. For the past two years she has shown up at the annual talkfest for the global elite, the World Economic Forum in Davos.
She has been fundraising assiduously, too: the Labour peer David Sainsbury has donated more than £100,000 over the past year to pay for a member of staff in Reeves’s office. Another £64,000 came from Gary Lubner, the former boss of Autoglass.
Reeves’s appearances on the prawn cocktail circuit and in the Swiss Alps highlights two fears: the risk that an incoming Labour government will be blown out of the water by the financial markets, and the sense that the Tories have a way of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
The latter concern is particularly acute. Reeves’s mantra that Labour’s tough stance on the public finances is “non-negotiable” is partly for the benefit of the City but mainly meant as reassurance to voters.
Her message that “stability is change” appears to have paid off. The Tories have tried to fight the election on the basis of Labour’s £2,000 “tax bombshell”, but Reeves insistence on a pared-down, fully costed manifesto has blunted that attack.
It hasn’t come without internal tensions. Some Labour advisers refer to Reeves and her Treasury team as the U-boat because “they stay submerged, they torpedo everyone else’s ideas, and then they slink off underwater and everyone else is left to pick up the survivors”.
With just days before she potentially walks into No 11, the question even some shadow cabinet colleagues struggle to answer is whether this studiedly cautious approach marks the limit of Reeves’s ambition for what Labour can achieve in government – and what happens if the hoped-for resurgence in growth fails to materialise.
“I think she starts with a lot of political capital, but she’s also going to need a lot of luck,” says Gauke. “If she gets that luck then she’s very well positioned to be a powerful, consequential chancellor of the exchequer.”
