The real question about Rachel Reeves’s CV
To begin with, I was appalled that anyone would even dream of suggesting Rachel Reeves lied on her CV. How dare they show such disrespect to the first woman to win the Victoria Cross, the Turner Prize and Premier League Goal of the Month.
Sadly, however, I’m beginning to fear that there might be something in this story after all. Until very recently, Ms Reeves’s profile on LinkedIn boasted that from 2006-09 she was an “economist” at Bank of Scotland. Yet it’s now been reported that her job was merely
in customer relations.
I can see why politicians might wish to embellish their CVs. In the same position, I’d much rather that voters thought my job title was “economist”. Because then I could go around saying, “I was an economist, so I know how to run the economy.” Which sounds rather more impressive than, for example, “I was a head of customer relations, so I know how to record this call for training or monitoring purposes.”
Anyway, we shouldn’t necessarily assume that Ms Reeves is a liar. It’s possible that she’s simply a harmless, Walter Mitty-style fantasist. Then again, Walter Mitty fantasised about exciting things, such as being a fighter pilot or an assassin. If Ms Reeves only fantasises about being an economist at Bank of Scotland, this suggests an alarming lack of imagination.
Either way, the real problem with this peculiar episode is that it could undermine public trust. After all, if we can’t be sure that Ms Reeves was an economist at Bank of Scotland, we can’t be sure about anything she says. In fact, are we absolutely sure that she’s Chancellor?
She regularly professes to be, but I’m starting to wonder. Last month, the
Telegraph revealed that Ms Reeves claimed £1,225 on expenses to pay someone else to
help file her tax return. Is that really a task with which an actual Chancellor of the Exchequer would require professional assistance? It’s like a Cambridge professor of mathematics needing help with his 10 times table, or a farmer having to google how many legs a cow has.
The Prime Minister must clear up this mystery, and fast. Until he does so, suspicions are bound to grow that Ms Reeves is only pretending to be Chancellor in order to burnish her CV, and thus land a better job. Such as economist at Bank of Scotland.
Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 7am every Tuesday and Saturday
