The real issue with Rachel Reeves as UK chancellor: she may be too qualified

Reeves holds a PPE degree from Oxford University and has six years of experience in central banking. In contrast, her predecessors, Gordon Brown and George Osborne, studied history and had limited relevant experience before becoming chancellor. Alistair Darling was a lawyer by training, while Philip Hammond’s credentials were largely unknown to the public.

Reeves’ qualifications and experience make her well-suited for the role of chancellor, which requires a combination of economic expertise and political acumen. Her ability to restore Labour’s credibility on the economy over three years of hard slog demonstrates her capabilities as a leader.

The online CV truthers’ criticism of Reeves is unfounded and based on a flawed assumption that she is not qualified for the job simply because of her gender. This attitude is unfair and undermines Reeves’ authority as chancellor.

In reality, Reeves deserves to be judged on her results, rather than being subject to suspicion and criticism based on her qualifications and experience. Her ability to make tough decisions, such as raising national insurance rates and tweaking policies like winter fuel payments, demonstrates her strength as a leader.

Ultimately, Reeves is Overqualified for the Role

Reeves’ critics should focus on evaluating her performance rather than making unfounded assumptions about her suitability for the job.

The Chancellor still exudes confidence about her biggest gamble, the national insurance rise for employers that has riled the CBI: pull on a thread this big and the budget would unravel. But as with Osborne’s pasty tax, it’s the relatively small decisions over which chancellors often sweat the most.

The row over taking winter fuel payments away from pensioners on very modest incomes, for example, seems only likely to intensify as the temperature drops. Might tweaking that policy to avoid unintended hardship come to seem in the long run more like strength than weakness?

Whatever their outcome, however, arguments about decisions like these are too important to be clouded by confected nonsense about this particular chancellor’s right to be taking them.

Reeves earned this job the hard way, restoring Labour’s credibility on the economy over three years of hard slog. She deserves to be judged now as anyone else would be: not with suspicion at the mere fact of her existence, but on her results.

The Impact of Online Criticism

Silly as it is, the kind of nitpicking over her credentials Reeves has experienced is undermining in a way that is hard to explain, but instantly recognisable if you have experienced something similar. It is confidence-sapping, infuriating, hard to counter without sounding rattled or pompous, but mostly just exhausting.

Among Sieghart’s interviewees for the book was Reeves’ favourite role model: not Britain’s iron lady but the US’s Janet Yellen, the first female secretary of the treasury and the first female chair of the Federal Reserve, who admitted that even at the top of her game she still checked and double-checked every detail because she never felt that “it will be assumed that I’m on top of this”.

Reeves’ Qualifications

With her PPE degree from Oxford and six years in central banking, on paper Reeves is, if anything, nerdily overqualified for what is essentially a political strategist’s job as much as an economist’s.

Gordon Brown read history and lectured in a further education college before becoming the preeminent chancellor of his generation, and Alistair Darling was a lawyer by training who rescued the nation from a run on the banks. George Osborne read history and dabbled in freelance journalism before making himself indispensable to the Conservative party.

But Reeves, apparently, is going to be made to earn the benefit of the doubt. Knowing that even the mildest course correction or retreat is likely to be pounced on by people just dying to say “I told you so”, meanwhile, makes an already high-wire act even more precarious.

In her 2021 book, The Authority Gap, the journalist Mary Ann Sieghart argued that most people are still hardwired to assume a man probably knows what he’s talking about until proven otherwise, whereas for a woman it’s the other way round.