No 10 refuses to say if Rachel Reeves broke ministerial code in CV deception row

Downing Street has refused to say whether Rachel Reeves broke the Ministerial Code amid accusations that she lied about her CV.

The Chancellor quietly edited her profile on LinkedIn last week to remove her previous claim that she worked as an economist at the Bank of Scotland between 2006 and 2009.

The site was updated to state that her role was in “retail banking” at Halifax. She has also been accused of lying about how long she spent working at the Bank of England.

On Monday, the Prime Minister’s official deputy spokesman was asked: “Is lying on your CV a breach of the Ministerial Code?”

The spokesman responded by pointing to the Treasury, before saying: “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.”

On being challenged about whether Ms Reeves had been “straight with the public” regarding her employment history, the spokesman declined to give a direct answer.

She said: “He is very clear that this is a Chancellor that has been straight with the public about the state of the public finances and what is necessary to restore financial stability – that is most important.”

‘Worked at the Bank for best part of a decade’

A Treasury source responded to the row over Ms Reeves’s LinkedIn profile last week by saying her resume was updated to reflect her retail banking experience.

The source said: “She worked in retail banking covering various areas drawing on her background as an economist. Her LinkedIn has been updated to reflect that.”

In an interview with Stylist magazine in 2021, Ms Reeves said she spent a decade as an economist at the Bank of England and “loved it”.

She made a similar claim in a video posted to her X profile on Sep 24 this year, in which she said: “I worked at the Bank for the best part of a decade.”

But Ms Reeves’s LinkedIn profile only lists a six-year period of service at the Bank, which ran from September 2000 to December 2006.

It came as the seniority of Ms Reeves’s experience was called into question on Monday after a historic tweet emerged in which she said she held a “very junior” role.

Responding to a post that has now been deleted, she wrote in May 2012: “Indeed – I first met him when I was the very junior Japan analyst at the Bank of England 12 years ago!”

One of the six years that Ms Reeves spent at the Bank was during her master’s degree at the London School of Economics (LSE).

‘Economical with the truth’

Throughout her time as shadow chancellor, Ms Reeves has repeatedly made the argument that her banking experience makes her best placed to grow the economy.

She wrote on X last year: “As a former Bank of England economist, I know what it will take to get Britain’s economy back on track.”

She has also said her tenure at the Bank of England taught her “how important stability is for our economy”, “what it takes to run a successful economy” and “the value of independent economic institutions”.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, accused Ms Reeves of being “economical with the truth” over the weekend.

He said: “During the election campaign, she lied through her teeth about not raising taxes on working people,” adding: “Now she’s been exposed brazenly lying about her CV, which would be curtains for most people. It’s one rule for her, another for everyone else.”

Last year, Ms Reeves said she held her “hands up” and confessed to having made mistakes when it emerged her new book included a number of passages from Wikipedia.

The Women Who Made Modern Economics, a 288-page guide to “overlooked” female economists, directly reproduced text from elsewhere without crediting the original sources.

Ms Reeves told the BBC at the time: “It is true that there were some sentences in the book that were not properly referenced in the bibliography.

“I’m the author of that book, I hold my hands up and say I should’ve done better… In any future reprints, I will make sure that everything is properly referenced in the bibliography.”

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