The personal ‘crimes’ and misdemeanours of Rachel Reeves keep mounting

Has any chancellor been caught out so often and not been sacked as Rachel Reeves, asks Simon Walters

They say a cat has nine lives, but Rachel Reeves appears to have even more.

She has been repeatedly caught out as chancellor over a catalogue of personal crimes and misdemeanours – and yet has defied the laws of political gravity by holding on to her job.

The new controversy to engulf her: her failure to get a licence to rent out her family home, and misleading the PM about what she and her husband knew about it, is the latest in a long line of controversies.

Reeves’s supporters dismiss them as “irrelevant” or “tittle tattle”.

But her growing army of critics disagree, partly because of the breathtaking scale and range of her falsehoods, exaggerations, half-truths, errors, omissions, failings, fibs and alleged downright lies.

It is worth listing them all.

Her 2023 book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was falsely presented as all her own work. The Financial Times revealed that there were more than 20 examples of passages from other sources lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, with no acknowledgement.

Reeves said they were “not properly referenced in the bibliography”. She said: “I hold my hands up and say I should have done better.” It led to her being called “the cut and paste chancellor”.

Her claim that she worked at the Bank of England for “the best part of a decade”, designed to boost her credentials as a future chancellor, turned out to be a gross exaggeration.

Her LinkedIn CV said she was there from September 2000 to December 2006, little more than six years.

In fact, she had left nine months earlier, in March 2006, a total of five and a half years, one year of which was spent studying; a long way short of a decade. She had to correct her CV.

Her claim in her CV that she was an “economist” at the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) was totally disingenuous, to say the least.

Following media reports, she corrected it to state she was in “retail banking”.

In fact, her job at HBOS was as “head of planning and customer relations” and “head of customer mortgages”. Hardly a qualification to be chancellor.

Her claim on LinkedIn that she worked at HBOS from March 2006 to December 2009 – for three and a half years – was another exaggeration. She had to correct it when it emerged that, in fact, she left in May 2009.

Her public pose as the “Iron Chancellor”, a model of self-discipline and financial prudence, took a hit when a BBC investigation reported that Reeves was one of three HBOS employees investigated for an alleged “cavalier” attitude to expense claims after a complaint by a whistleblower.

The outcome of the inquiry is not known. Reeves said she had no knowledge of any investigation and denied any wrongdoing.

The account in Reeves’s Who’s Who entry of her record as a contributor to the prestigious Journal of Political Economy was seemingly yet another exaggeration.

In fact, she had just one article published in the less prestigious European Journal of Political Economy. Sources close to the chancellor said there was no record of how the entry was made or who approved its wording.

It all begs the question: why has Keir Starmer, supposedly renowned for his ruthlessness, thrown a protective iron shield around his Downing Street neighbour?

It is not as if she is doing so brilliantly in her day job that her personal failings can be written off as a price worth paying.

Her political “crimes” as chancellor may be fewer in number than her personal ones, but they are millions of times more costly to the nation’s wellbeing.

And the damage done by the jobs-destroying rise in employers’ NI contributions in her first Budget – and the twin humiliation of being forced to abandon welfare reforms and reverse the abolition of winter fuel payments to the elderly – cannot be wiped clean by amending that LinkedIn CV.

Reeves’s political reputation is likely to take another dive if, as expected, she tears up the Labour manifesto by imposing swingeing tax rises in the next few weeks.

One can only hope that she gives greater attention to the details of the Budget than when she failed to carry out the elementary task of obtaining the licence needed to rent out the London home she vacated on moving into the chancellor’s grace-and-favour Downing Street flat.

If she doesn’t, the prime minister may finally have to remove her “licence” to occupy the role of chancellor, leaving Reeves to suffer the unfortunate, but perhaps apt, indignity of being forced to move back into the house she rented out unlawfully.

The only paperwork required would be a letter of dismissal from No 10.