Women’s work in the field of economics has been underappreciated and even erased, Rachel Reeves tells Frances Hedges, but she is on a mission to rewrite those histories – and become Britain’s first female chancellor
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER ROLE has existed for more than 700 years, and women have been in parliament for 104 of those. We have had three female prime ministers (whatever we may make of their respective legacies), yet to date, never a female chancellor. Why should that be?
‘The truth is, when people picture what a chancellor looks like, they have in their heads a picture of a man,’ says Rachel Reeves MP, who is hoping to turn the tide of history and take charge of the nation’s finances, should Labour win the next general election.
‘That’s partly because since entering politics, women have been encouraged to focus on social and domestic issues – things like equal pay and childcare, which are vital because they didn’t previously have a champion. But as a result, we’re at risk of being pigeonholed, and expected to leave the other issues to men.’
Reeves, who speaks to me from her Westminster office, is arguably more qualified than any other recent candidate to take on the chancellorship. A keen chess player (she was the under-14s girls’ champion as a child), Oxford PPE graduate and trained economist who started her career at the Bank of England, she lives and breathes numbers, but that’s not to suggest she’s short on human compassion. Her interest in politics, she says, arose while she was still at school, initially after seeing her mother, a special-needs expert, have to convert to classroom teaching because her funding was taken away, and then more seriously when, as a state-school sixth-former, she became frustrated by the obvious negative impact of Conservative cuts to public finances on her surroundings. ‘I remember we were based in two prefab huts in the playground that were freezing in winter and baking in summer, with windows that didn’t open properly,’ she says. ‘Then our school library got turned into a classroom because there wasn’t enough space. I was very studious and wanted to do well, but I felt like the odds were stacked against me.’ Rather than simply grumble about her circumstances, she joined the Labour Party, attracted by Tony Blair’s mantra of ‘Education, education, education’, and started campaigning at weekends.
The repeated experience of being one of only a few women in her space – first in the financial industry, and latterly when she entered parliament – seems not to have deterred her from making her voice heard. Being a competitive chess player may, Reeves suggests, have helped prepare her to thrive when outnumbered. ‘It was always incredibly male-dominated,’ she says. ‘I must have been about seven or eight when, at a chess tournamen
