Next week, Rachel Reeves will face the biggest day of her political career as she delivers the first Budget of a Labour Government for more than 14 years. It is a moment that the 45-year-old Chancellor has been preparing for since she was a student. She has been involved in Labour politics for decades, and while studying at Oxford had a picture of Gordon Brown – bought, she says, by friends as a joke – on her desk in an early sign of her ideal career endpoint.
“As a young woman she would get involved in a lot of Labour groups,” a source who has known Reeves for years told i . “She would turn up and sit on the committee, but she wouldn’t push herself forward for election to any of the executive positions. She built up a powerful network but didn’t threaten anyone because she wasn’t after any of the jobs.
” This quiet rise through the Labour ranks – a contrast to her more outgoing Cabinet colleagues such as Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner – continued for a long time. Rather than taking a job in the party or the trade union movement, Reeves used her training as an economist to find work with the Bank of England. Dame Sue Owen was her boss in Washington DC when she became the Bank’s first member of staff posted in the US capital.
Dame Sue said: “She was instantly very likeable, incredibly clever. She could pick up on a quite complex argument very, very quickly. But she wasn’t a nerd, you know – she was also very sociable.
In some ways she was an ideal.