What Rachel Reeves’s CV reveals about Labour

Rachel Reeves is in trouble over her CV again. The UK chancellor was already in hot water after her frequent lofty pre-election boasts that she worked as an economist at HBOS. As it turned out, these claims didn’t quite align with her actual stint in the HBOS complaints department. There has also been speculation about the exact nature and length of her employment at the Bank of England, and some odd incidents involving expenses. Claims about her abilities as a child chess genius also look rather overblown.

Her latest sticky moment follows in this tradition. In her entry in Who’s Who, a reference book with more than 32,500 autobiographical entries, Reeves lists herself as a contributor to the prestigious Chicago-based Journal of Political Economy (JPE). In fact, she has published a single article in the similarly named European Journal of Political Economy (EJPE).

This is a much bigger deal than it may sound to us non-economists. The JPE is one of the top publications in the field. Publishing a paper in JPE gets you a glow-up, and all but guarantees you a job at a top university. It’s a name that opens doors. Getting your thoughts in the EJPE is nice, but it has nowhere near that clout. It’s a bit like saying you’ve been a contributor to the London Review of Books when you’ve only had a letter published in Razzle.

This mismatch between what she claims and the literal truth is a recurring problem for Reeves. In this respect (and this respect alone, sadly), she reminds me of the late Marc Bolan, glittering glam superstar of T Rex fame. Bolan would, famously, add little extras to his list of achievements (which were impressive enough in reality). He would say he’d had six No1 hits, instead of just the four. Or claim he’d received an advance of £50,000 when it was really £30,000. He would make everything sound just a little bit more glam than it actually was.

In a pop star like the bopping elf, such embroiderings are quite endearing and harmless. But the magnificent Marc was not – again, sadly – ever the chancellor of the exchequer, or ever in the running to be (imagine if he had been: emergency tax relief on cosmetics and platform heels, the nationalisation of feather-boa production…).

This kind of behaviour rankles much more in a politician. Lord Archer was another such enhancer, memorably claiming to have been educated at Wellington. This was technically true, though everyone thought this meant the prestigious Wellington College in Berkshire, not Wellington School in Somerset, where he actually attended. Just look where that tendency got him.

Even Archer, though, has a kind of roguish gleam and talent. Rachel Reeves? Not so much. Like so many of her cabinet colleagues, from the top down, Reeves is an odd and empty figure. They are the ‘hollow men’, the stuffed men (and women) whose dried voices, when they whisper together, are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats’ feet over broken glass in a dry cellar.

Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillipson et al put me in mind of a phrase from the immediate postwar world, when such distantly bland public figures became known as ‘the faceless ones’. These were the new bureaucrats of the push-button age – the unreachable and remote people who replaced the familiar bank managers and family doctors of the old world. My generation and those who came next grew up in the new world, so we don’t even notice how strange it is.

Time and again, with the obvious exceptions of Angela Rayner and David Lammy, one looks at the cabinet and wonders: who are these people? Where did they find the likes of Jonathan Reynolds or Anneliese Dodds?

The CV embellishments are not unique to Reeves, either. The aforementioned Reynolds, now business secretary, apparently forgot he wasn’t a qualified solicitor when recounting his backstory on his website and addressing the House of Commons. I think we should cut the fellow some slack. Maybe he’s just naturally foggy as a March morning and forgets he isn’t an astronaut, or a dairy maid, or the current interim president of Burkina Faso.

It’s almost as if these people hatched from pods and their backstories were assembled by an early AI that made a few little errors. These are such peculiar glitches, they make one nostalgic for the reckless and obvious chicanery of Grant Shapps who, while a Tory MP, worked on the side as web marketer under the pseudonym, ‘Michael Green’.

The most annoying thing about the CV scandals happening under a Labour government is that we are always asked to give this lot the benefit of the doubt – to accept that these were just some minor admin errors made by staffers, etc, etc. This is leeway that Labourites never indulge for anybody else. These are exactly the kind of misdemeanours that they would normally fulminate about – when it’s not them caught doing it. So Starmer’s lockdown pizza slice was somehow fine, whereas Boris Johnson’s lockdown birthday cake meant the end of civilisation.

Embellishing your CV to get a top job is not a small detail. By trying to frame it as nothing much, Reeves and the government are aiming to recategorise it as trivia. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.