Rachel Reeves dares to be dull. In her interview yesterday morning on the Today programme, the Shadow Chancellor took care to say nothing new, and to say it in estuary English of surpassing blandness.
She respects the independence of the Bank of England, so will not tell it what to do about interest rates. She also respects the independence of the Office of Budget Responsibility.
And at the Treasury, if she takes over as Chancellor, her fiscal rules will be “non-negotiable”, so she provides “that rock of economic and fiscal stability”.
All this goes down wonderfully well, and is designed to go down wonderfully well, with the powers that be. As a senior Treasury source this week told ConHome:
“She has transformed the Labour Party’s approach to economic policy. She’s astute, and as a professional economist she would be arguably be the best qualified Chancellor since Hugh Gaitskell.
“She is well aware of the trade offs an incoming Labour government would have to make. But her party’s expectations will run high and managing them will be a huge challenge.”
How seriously should we take this dull facade? Since Labour is terrified of a repeat of the 1992 general election, which it unexpectedly lost in part because it was accused of planning to inflict a “Tax Bombshell” on the British people, we should take it with complete seriousness as a piece of political positioning.
But what will happen if and when a Labour Government has been elected? Robert Colvile pointed out in January in The Sunday Times that the Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has “a new ten-year plan for the NHS” which includes “one of the biggest expansions of the NHS workforce in history”.
How is that going to be paid for? And what about the first NHS crisis which erupts once Labour is in power, when the cry goes up that more money must be provided or people will die?
And what about the “police hubs” in every community and 13,000 new coppers that Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, wants to provide?
Will Sir Keir Starmer continue to side with Reeves, and agree that her fiscal rules must take priority? Even he cannot know for sure, at this stage, what he will do when the heat is on.
Managing the Labour Party’s expectations will indeed be a huge challenge. Many in the party will want to pay for higher spending with higher borrowing and taxes.
Like Gordon Brown before her, Reeves herself has decided there is nothing to be gained from departing in either the last years in Opposition or the first years in power from the path of prudence. Otherwise the financial markets will destroy her as surely as they destroyed Liz Truss.
But in these profiles, an attempt is made to work out what someone is actually like, and Reeves, I would suggest even at the risk of being accused of writing knocking copy, is an interesting person.
Listen to her as she plays chess against Dominic Lawson in 2013. She is amused, charming, takes with sangfroid his impertinent inquiries, loses with grace while protesting that he has distracted her.
He remarks that she has “a very aggressive style”, to which she replies “reckless”, for on this occasion her attacks have not succeeded.
Reeves won the British under-14 girls’ chess championship, and told Katy Balls of The Spectator what lessons she had learnt from the game:
“Thinking ahead. Trying to think what your opponent might do – and how you would respond to that. I was a very aggressive chess player: attack, attack, attack. All the time!”
In recent remarks to The Financial Times, Reeves said of Labour’s current position:
“It’s like we are a rook up on move 30. But we’re playing an opponent who usually beats us.”
To beat the Conservatives, she implied, a grinding war of attrition is the correct strategy, since Labour already has a decisive advantage.
All of which poses a problem for journalists who have to write about her. She sometimes unbends sufficiently to make an amusing remark, as in this observation to The Financial Times:
“Reeves joked she had no plans to levy ‘a special FT reader tax’ or target the wealthy beyond previously announced plans. The party would end tax breaks enjoyed by private equity executives and private schools, and abolish tax perks secured by individuals claiming non-domiciled status.”
But more often she remains relentlessly dull and robotic, as when she travelled a few weeks ago to Washington to deliver a speech on “securonomics”, a term coined by herself:
“From the ashes of the old hyper-globalisation, securonomics emerges.”
It sounds like one of those dodgy pseudo-religions which used to be advertised on the London Underground. But Jason Cowley, Editor in Chief of The New Statesman, who accompanied her on this trip and wrote a long piece about it, observes that Reeves realises, more than any other senior Labour politician, that the world has turned from globalisation towards “economic nationalism”.
How does Labour become once more a national party? Since it used to believe in nationalisation, this ought to be a natural enough evolution.
Gordon Brown realised what Labour needed to do when he spoke of “British jobs for British workers”, and now Reeves is by her own admission searching for “a national story”.
Just as Joe Biden is, in her account, “rebuilding America’s economic security, strength and resilience”, so Labour will do this for Britain by rebuilding “an active state” with stronger national industries.
Patrick Maguire, for The Times, and David Gauke, on ConservativeHome, are among those who questioned in recent weeks whether Labour would stick to its Green Prosperity Plan, announced by Reeves in 2021, to spend £28 billion a year, or £140 billion in the course of the next Parliament, on green projects.
On 9th June Reeves rowed back from this spending commitment: she now says it will only be reached in the second half of that Parliament. To the frustration of her colleagues, in this case Ed Miliband, spending control will come first, or so she says.
Reeves was born in February 1979 in Lewisham, in south London. Her parents, who were primary school teachers, in due course split up.
Her grandparents on her father’s side, with whom she spent many holidays, had moved from Swansea to Kettering, where they worked in the shoe industry and were keen members of the Salvation Army.
She was educated at Cator Park School for Girls, in Bromley, read PPE at New College, Oxford, did an MSc in Economics at the LSE and joined the Bank of England as an economist.
While serving in Washington, she met Nick Joicey, a high-flying civil servant who at one stage wrote speeches for Gordon Brown and is now at the Cabinet Office as Director General of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat
They are married with two children and a host of friends. Reeves, almost unbelievably, writes 3,200 Christmas cards. “She’s always sending me Christmas cards and wanting to get together,” one of the recipients told ConHome.
She joined the Labour Party when she was 16, in the 2005 general election stood as the Labour candidate in Bromley and Chislehurst, in 2010 entered Parliament as the Member for Leeds West, and was at once identified as a potential future leader.
Sometimes she overdid it: in 2013, as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, she said benefit claimants would lose their benefits if they refused to take jobs.
But while the Labour Left denounced her as a “closet Tory”, the wider public began to get the message that Labour was there to represent workers, not benefit claimants.
At every turn, Reeves proclaims her desire to serve ordinary working people. Her younger sister, Ellie, is Labour MP for Lewisham West and Penge, and is married to John Cryer, Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead.
From 2015-20, while Jeremy Corbyn was leader, Rachel Reeves was out of the front line, but now she is back, in May 2021 replacing the ineffectual Anneliese Dodds as Shadow Chancellor.
During her shadow Chancellorship there have been four Conservative Chancellors: Sunak, Zahawi, Kwarteng and Hunt.
Reeves has met an implausibly large number of chief executives and bankers, and knows how to talk to them.
She says she wants to work as closely with Starmer as George Osborne once did with David Cameron.
Already, it is said, Starmer forgets who works for him and who works for Reeves. How they must hope that by the time of the next general election, Sunak, Hunt and the Bank of England will have administered the bitter medicine needed to get inflation under control, and will be punished for having done so.
At which point, the world may learn whether “securonomics” means anything.