What Reeves said on her CV vs her actual experience

How the claims Ms Reeves has made about her CV and employment experience compare to her work record

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Rachel Reeves has faced accusations of lying after it emerged that her online CV had been updated and appears to have exaggerated her experience as an economist.
The Chancellor drew criticism from senior Tories, including Robert Jenrick and former government advisers, after changing her CV to more accurately reflect her experience.
On Monday, Downing Street refused to say whether Rachel Reeves broke the ministerial code. The Prime Minister’s official deputy spokesman was asked: “Is lying on your CV a breach of the ministerial code?”
The spokesman said: “I think with regards to the Chancellor, the Prime Minister is very clear that the Chancellor has restored fiscal stability. This is someone who, on coming into office, looked under the bonnet and exposed a £22 billion black hole in the public finances and has been honest with the public.”
Here is how the claims Ms Reeves has made about her CV and employment experience compare to her actual work record.
She was accused of lying about her job history on Nov 15 after it emerged she had quietly edited her online CV in response to a report by the Guido Fawkes website.
The political blog claimed she had been wrong to suggest she worked as an economist for the Bank of Scotland between 2006 and 2009 before leaving to seek election. Her LinkedIn profile was subsequently changed to reflect that she in fact spent three years in retail banking at Halifax, the Bank of Scotland’s parent company.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, accused Ms Reeves of being “economical with the truth”, and the Tories accused her of “deception”.
A Treasury source said Ms Reeves’s online CV was updated to reflect her retail banking experience as this had drawn on “her background as an economist”.
The edit nonetheless sparked embarrassing headlines for Downing Street and the Treasury, with sources refusing to clarify whether it had been a change or a correction.
Ms Reeves has also been accused of exaggerating how long she spent working at the Bank of England. Speaking to Stylist magazine in 2021, the Chancellor said she had spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank and “loved it”.
It was not the only time she made such a claim in the years before becoming Chancellor. In a video from September 2022, she said: “I worked at the Bank of England for the best part of a decade.”
But her LinkedIn profile states that she only worked for the Bank for just over six years, with a start date of September 2000 and an end date of December 2006.
It also clarifies that she spent 18 months across 2002 and 2003 on secondment at the British Embassy in Washington DC, working as the second secretary in the economic division. The first year she spent at the Bank was during her time as a student at the London School of Economics in the international economic analysis division.
Apart from how long Ms Reeves worked at the Bank for, questions have also been asked about how senior she was during her time there.
In one of a series of posts highlighting her credentials on X, formerly Twitter, last year, she said: “As a former Bank of England economist, I know what it will take to get Britain’s economy back on track.”
Other posts on the platform said her time at the Bank taught her “how important stability is for our economy”, “what it takes to run a successful economy” and “the value of independent economic institutions”.
But a separate post, which dates from 2012 but did not surface until Nov 18 this year, said in response to a deleted tweet: “Indeed – I first met him when I was the very junior Japan analyst at the Bank of England 12 years ago!”
Henry Newman, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, said: “Rachel Reeves has systematically used her time at the Bank of England to claim she had credentials for the job of Chancellor.
“In fact, in this tweet from 2012 she admitted the truth – that the role was that of a ‘very junior’ analyst. Some people may try and claim these are white lies or just silly attacks. I disagree.”
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