Rachel Reeves: truth-twister of the year

Crime is a strange thing. There is a great chasm between what we know about the real-life horror of it and what we ignore in order to be entertained. We know that being murdered is just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone, but a huge amount of family entertainment is based around murder, leading to the cult of ‘cosy crime’. We know that murder is a worse crime than rape, but Agatha Christie wouldn’t have written a book called ‘The Rape of Roger Ackroyd’.

Lying is another one. Of course, lying’s not always a crime. You can’t sue someone for stringing you along, not since ‘breach of promise’ was abolished in law in 1971. A fictional liar who gets his or her own way may be called things like a ‘silver-tongued devil’ – indeed, we have the modern female fictional example, Philip Pullman’s splendid young heroine, Lyra Belacqua, who is renamed Lyra Silvertongue by the armoured bear king. She wears this name proudly, even though it basically means she’s just the most enormous and talented fibber. The Pretty Little Liars sound a lot more fun than if they were the ‘Pretty Little Truth-Tellers’.

When we turn to the world of professional liars, though, it’s a different can of worms. No one loves a scammer, and even big-time fraudsters seem a bit grubby.

Lying politicians must surely come top of the list of most-loathed liars. We used to shrug them off, or give them funny names like ‘Paddy Pantsdown’, as their lying was usually connected to some Carry On-ish sexual shenanigans. But in recent years, it’s far less of a laughing matter. For the first time since the rise of fascism, there is a sizeable minority of citizens (often the younger cohort) in the West who believe that democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, because apparently ‘They’re all the same’ – politicians, that is, whose inability to tell the truth marks them out as not worth voting for.

There can be no British government in history that has been caught out lying so much in such a short time as the Keir Starmer omnishambles. And there is no lie-lover in that band of jackanapes, poltroons and cut-purses the prime minister calls his cabinet as apparently ravenous as his chancellor, Rachel Reeves. She can’t get enough of the stuff. What’s more, she appears to believe her own lies, or she wouldn’t parade them so flagrantly in this age of instant fact-checking. Does she wake up, Red Queen-like in the morning, and think: ‘What six impossible things shall I lie about before breakfast?’

But Reeves is no Lyra Silvertongue – she’s more like Lyra Legotongue. And when she treads on what she’s dropped, surely it must hurt. The latest incident indicating that Reeves is perhaps more ‘economical with the vérité’ than most is centred around chess, and whether or not she really was ‘the British girls’ under-14 champion’, as she told a newspaper in 2023. Chess has a reputation as a sexy game, due mostly to the 1968 film, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which two ravishing rotters used it as foreplay. Still, it’s harder to think of anything further from Faye Dunaway groping herself to put Steve McQueen off his moves than this half-remembered provincial teenage triumph, which may or may not be a falsehood.

Once more, Reeves’s recollections appear to vary more than most. There was the accusation that she fiddled her CV, claiming that she had been at the Bank of England for 10 years when it appears to have been only half that. There was the LinkedIn boast that she had been an economist with the Halifax Bank of Scotland, whereas she was actually in the complaints department. She claimed in Who’s Who to have had work published in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, but apparently not. She told the Yorkshire Post, in her very first interview as an MP, that she had once gone on secondment to the British embassy in Washington as the Bank of England’s ‘economic secretary advising on economic policy’ – also no.

Then there’s the accusations of plagiarism regarding her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics. In a classic bit of sorry-not-sorry footwork, she told the BBC in 2023: ‘I take responsibility for everything that is in that book… What I wanted to do was to bring together the stories of these women, and if I’m guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read then I’m really proud of that.’

Most recently, of course, came the ‘black hole’ brouhaha, in which she painted a misleadingly bleak figure of the UK’s public finances to justify tax rises for a splurge in welfare spending. This led many of us to reflect that the biggest black hole of all must be in Rachel Reeves’s amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum and prefrontal cortex, where memories are stored.

Though I never watched The Inbetweeners myself, when I mentioned I was writing this essay to my husband, he sent me a YouTube compilation concerning the antics of a character called Jay Cartwright. Jay is constantly making outrageous, obviously untrue boasts about his sexual experiences in order to impress his mates and cover up his insecurities. Is something similar driving the profoundly mediocre Rachel? It’s not hard to imagine Jay saying, ‘Yeah, I’m a chess champion, me!’.

In my opinion, Rachel Reeves (like me) never really grew up. There are lots of us, for various reasons. But whereas my immaturity and love of attention has made me pathologically honest, keen to own up to all kinds of awful things in order to outrage friends and strangers alike, she has gone the more conventional route of fibbing in order to gain approval. If she were in an ordinary job, without a great deal of power and responsibility, there would be nothing especially noteworthy about this. But whereas lying in private life can be kind (trying not to hurt someone’s feelings) or even sexy, lying in public life is another thing entirely. It can, over the years, corrode the whole democratic system, and should thus be called out with extreme prejudice.

For me, the most affecting part of the Frankenstein story was when the monster demands that Dr F create a bride for him: ‘Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?’ Though they are both happily married to other people, one can’t help feeling that Starmer and Reeves have been fashioned by some demonic artificer to provide the perfect level of android-like for each other. It would be sad to see the PM chuck his soul(less)mate under the bus. But after the year she’s had, I get the distinct feeling that Reeves is just one more whopper away from the chop.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.