I’ve been more than slightly troubled by Rachel Reeves’s CV, and I’ve been wondering if she was ‘let go’ by one or even both of her main employers – the Bank of England (BoE) and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS). I don’t have much material to back up my suspicions, but sometimes in life, we find ourselves in situations where we have to make a judgement based on inadequate information and our experience. Having worked in almost 100 organisations in the private and public sectors across fifteen countries, and having been hired and fired several times in my less than distinguished career, I believe one can develop what our German friends, in their melodic language, call ‘fingerspitzengefühl’ (fingertips feeling) about certain situations. And that’s what I’ve tried to use for this article.
Let’s start with Rachel Reeves’s time at the BoE. According to PA Media Factcheck, the Bank of England confirmed to the PA news agency that Ms. Reeves worked for them during the dates on the LinkedIn page (2000 to 2006). This includes a stint with the British Embassy in Washington DC, which was a secondment from the U.K.’s central bank – and which Ms. Reeves talked about in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, in August 2023. Some of Ms. Reeves’s time at the Bank can also be charted through papers she contributed to during her employment there.
In a December 2005 paper, she is listed as part of the Bank’s structural economic analysis division, which matches the detail on the LinkedIn page. She is also thanked for her contributions to a December 2001 speech by Charlie Bean, who was the Bank of England’s chief economist at the time.
Following her six years at the BoE, Reeves went to work for the bank HBOS in their Leeds office. From the little I’ve been able to find out, I believe the Leeds office dealt mainly with administrative issues rather than the type of intricate economic analysis Rachel Reeves would probably have done at the BoE. If I am correct, then a question arises: why would someone who had a successful career at the centre of the economic action at the BoE in London and Washington move to working in a mainly administrative office for a retail bank in Leeds? I’m sure Leeds is a wonderful town, but it doesn’t feel like the move from the BoE in London and Washington to HBOS in Leeds was part of a major career progression for an economic superstar who would one day become our Chancellor. In fact, it rather feels to me as if someone at the BoE had a quiet word with Rachel Reeves and suggested that there would be limited opportunities for her at the BoE, so perhaps her no doubt considerable talents could possibly be better employed elsewhere.
As most readers will know, there is reportedly a lack of clarity about what Rachel Reeves actually did at HBOS. We do know that she was employed there from 2006 to 2009. I believe she was in some kind of management role. But if that role had been quite senior, one might have thought she would have highlighted this on her LinkedIn profile rather than just writing that she had been an economist. After all, someone who has demonstrated skills in economic analysis and who had also shown that they could successfully manage large numbers of subordinates would, I believe, be much more attractive to a future employer than someone who had only spent their whole career as an economist.
HBOS collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis and was taken over by Lloyds. Following the Lloyds takeover, the bank’s management launched a massive programme of cost cutting. In 2009, the Guardian newspaper explained:
When Lloyds’s rearing black horse kicked Halifax’s white Xs off a huge brown brick building in the centre of Leeds, marketing manager Rachel McHale thought her job was safe; she could not have been more wrong. Six months after the takeover in January, she was made redundant. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I was shocked because I’d been there for 15 years and thought they would want to retain my skills. I didn’t just lose my salary. I lost everything I had struggled for, like health insurance for my family and a company car.”
The redundancies have not stopped. Many of McHale’s former colleagues were told last week they would also be losing their jobs when Lloyds announced that 460 posts would be slashed in Leeds, one of Britain’s financial hubs.
That was part of 5,000 job losses earmarked by Britain’s biggest high-street bank. It has axed an estimated 15,000 roles since the rescue takeover of HBOS, which put 43% of Lloyds’s shares in the hands of the taxpayer. The toll has been higher at Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the taxpayer stake will soon rise to 84%, with 20,000 cuts announced.
It seems that Reeves’s departure from HBOS coincided with the 2009 jobs massacre. What we don’t know is whether her departure was voluntary, as she sought to move on to develop her career in pastures new, or whether the bank’s management decided that Reeves’s talents were no longer essential to ensuring the bank’s future financial success. Somebody out there does know the truth. But finding that person might be difficult.
I fully accept that my suspicions of Reeves possibly being let go by HBOS and maybe even by the BoE are purely based on a vague feeling that we haven’t been told the whole truth about our Chancellor’s career success or otherwise before she was handed control of our fine country’s finances. And I believe that this information could be important to those of us who are somewhat unconvinced by her economic performance in her first six months as Chancellor. So I feel that there are some probing questions which could and should be asked by our mainstream media’s intrepid and dogged investigative journalists, like… like… well, um… like… Actually, having seen how all our mainstream media journalists seemed to have obediently parroted the government line on such issues as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity of lockdowns, the safety and effectiveness of certain medical treatments, the motivation for the appalling Southport murders and the utter nonsense of anthropogenic climate change, I can’t really think of any real mainstream media investigative journalists I would trust. So I doubt we’ll ever find out the truth about Ms. Reeves’s real reasons for leaving the BoE and HBOS.
However, whatever doubts people may have about Rachel Reeves’s qualities and suitability as our Chancellor, we have to remember that her predecessor as Shadow Chancellor was the intellectual and political colossus Anneliese Dodds. I invite any interested readers to have a look at Anneliese Dodds’s education and career highlights so you can judge for yourselves her fitness to run our country’s finances.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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