, Columnist
Rachel Reeves Risks a Doom Loop of Her Own Making
The British chancellor needs to break free from her box of hopeless promises.
A trap of her own making.
Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
When Rachel Reeves was at college some friends gave her a framed photograph of then-Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown as a joke. “They knew how much I loved the Treasury,” she later explained.
It’s now commonplace to dismiss Brown as a lugubrious misfit, particularly in the light of his rather rocky three years as prime minister. But at the tail end of the 1990s, he was something of a swashbuckling hero to economics students, having liberated the Bank of England from ministerial control and turned the Treasury into a campaigning arm of government in the fields of child poverty and overseas aid.