Rachel Reeves: Chess champion to treasury - the UK's first female chancellor

Rachel Reeves is a former Bank of England economist and now the UK's first female chancellor.

Alongside Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, she worked to change the party's image among voters after it suffered its worst defeat since 1935 at the 2019 election.

Ms Reeves has sought to portray Labour as fiscally responsible, saying she would never "play fast and loose" with the nation's finances. She is seen as a crucial component in making Labour appear more credible to voters and in providing business with the reassurance it craves following years of upheaval.

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Early life

Ms Reeves was born in 1979 in Lewisham, southeast London, to Graham and Sally Reeves, who were both teachers and split up when she was seven.

She is the older sister of Ellie Reeves, the Labour MP for Lewisham West and East Dulwich, and is married to Nicholas Joicey, a civil servant and former speech writer to Gordon Brown. She and Mr Joicey have two children.

Along with her sister, Ms Reeves was educated at an all-girls comprehensive school in Beckenham - Cator Park - which she said "really believed" in her and "gave me everything I needed to get on".

In an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2022, she described how she would work on school projects during the holidays because she liked to "do well at things" and get "top marks".

"Looking back, I really was such a swot," she said, describing how, despite the school boycotting SATs exams, she did them in her free time "because I wanted to know if I was good enough".

"So for a week I spent my lunchtimes sitting in a classroom on my own doing these exams, to find out what I would have got if I'd really done them," she said. "The school allowed me to be a bit eccentric."

Ms Reeves's competitive streak can also be found in her love of chess, which her father taught her when she was aged seven, giving her the "chess bug". She later became the British girls under-14 champion.

Political career

Ms Reeves's competitive spirit has seen her rise to the very top of Labour's ranks.

First elected in 2010 for the seat of Leeds West - now Leeds West and Pudsey following the boundary changes - she was appointed to her first shadow ministerial role that year in the Department for Work and Pensions.

Three years later she was promoted to shadow work and pensions secretary, where she sparked controversy by vowing to be tougher than the Tories on welfare.

"Nobody should be under any illusions that they are going to be able to live a life on benefits under a Labour government," she said in an interview with The Guardian at the time.

Ms Reeves's ruthlessness with the public purse strings has earned her comparisons with the late Baroness Thatcher, whom she invoked in the prestigious Mais lecture in the City of London.

There have also been some signs of friction with trade unions as she seeks to portray Labour as both "pro worker" and "pro business" - leading the party to rebrand its "new deal for working people" as "Labour's plan to make work pay".

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, criticised the rebrand - saying the new plan had "more holes than Swiss cheese".

The next 'Iron Lady'?

Although she did not name the Iron Lady directly in her Mais lecture, Ms Reeves suggested Labour was going to inherit an economic challenge similar to the one that greeted Baroness Thatcher when she came to power in 1979.

She promised to oversee a "decade of national renewal" - a phrase used by the former Tory prime minister - and said Britain stood at an "inflection point" as it did at the end of the 1970s.

Her speech did not suggest she would follow Baroness Thatcher's policies - indeed she has committed to scrapping anti-trade union laws - but parallels were drawn with Rishi Sunak and his most recent Mais lecture.

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One of the main criticisms of Ms Reeves is that she has not given enough information on what Labour's economic policies would be in government.

However, this approach was in line with Labour's strategy for winning over voters ahead of the election by projecting an image of stability and cautiousness.

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She has also drawn criticism from the left of the party for refusing to alter Tory policies including the two-child benefit cap and for watering down Labour's landmark £28bn green investment pledge.

Ms Reeves's critics in the Conservative Party have taken to calling her the "Wikipedia chancellor" or the "copy and paste chancellor" after she admitted "inadvertent mistakes" meant sections of her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, were copied from Wikipedia.

However, she said such errors would be rectified in future reprints.