Express reporter Mieka Smiles says that Rachel Reeves’s CV tweak has revealed a lot about her (Image: Getty)
There’s no harm in selling yourself. And you can definitely to the max with a bit of creativity.
Social media is awash with questionable videos that go one step further than that for a laugh. One recommends that those with a paper round describe themselves as media distribution officers and that someone selling burgers in McDonald’s should pitch themselves as handling financial transactions for a global company.
But rather than chuckling along with the rest of us, it seems as though Rachel Reeves, bless her heart, actually took that advice and ran with it – listing a that, by all accounts, she never actually had.
The so-called creative tweaking of her CV first broke on political blog Guido Fawkes around a month ago. It said that Reeves had claimed that after serving in junior positions at the Bank of England that in 2006 she moved to the Bank of Scotland to work as an economist before Parliament called in 2009.
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Rachel Reeves needs to listen more rather than focus on spreadsheets, says reporter Mieka Smiles (Image: Getty)
The publication, however, said that her description – and that instead Reeves actually worked “in a mundane support department at the bank”.
The relentless news cycle quickly moved on and the story seemed kind of forgotten. Perhaps she’d not fibbed after all – and it was just a little bit of a mix up?
What she did next, however, was so bizarrely naive that not only did it put paid to that presumption, I reckon it’s the one character trait – or perhaps lack of one – that’ll be her downfall.
Quite unbelievably – and in a scene I imagine worthy of The Thick of It – she returned to the crime scene and updated her LinkedIn profile so it became more a fitting record of the truth.
I mean, what the actual hell? Did she really think – as effectively second in command of the country and at the helm of its economy and financial future – that no one was going to notice?
That people would turn a blind eye? That there wouldn’t be a hundred resultant headlines?
That everyone would think “ah well” and stop digging? Or that she’d prevent a million memes about her now being a construction manager after getting snapped in a hardhat? Or stop her from being superimposed on ’s body as the new Match of the Day presenter? Hilarious.
But, of course, all of this points to a much deeper and more serious problem about Ms Reeves that no one is actually laughing about – and that’s because her obviously amateurish approach as Chancellor now threatens not just to make her CV look a little patchy but also see her bomb the economy too.
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Economist or not – it doesn’t really matter. As an Oxford educated maths bod, her intelligence is not really in question. The clear issue that’s tripping her up now is that she has the human skills of an Alexa – and it’s showing.
Even if her employment history was a bit inaccurate, she’s clever on paper: but to be an effective politician you need to be much more than that.
From the very outset Reeves has made really poor decisions that might have looked good to her in numbers – but have played out absolutely dreadfully.
The cruel and blunt whipping away of the winter fuel allowance from elderly people is case in point. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could foresee that this would be horrifically unpopular.
Most people, however, understood that wealthy pensioners shouldn’t be in receipt of the benefit and that there was a more sensible way it could be done, if necessary.
Now things have gone from bad to worse. From the farmers whose families look set to lose their livelihoods due to her introduction of inheritance tax through to the hiking up of national insurance for British businesses, who are now saying they must slash jobs as a result.
By being more human – and listening to what people who really know about all this had to say – she would have made the world of difference rather than focusing solely on the spreadsheets.
I do hope she changes course and reverses some of the damage she’s now wreaking – or at the very least tries to be a bit less robotic. Because if she doesn’t she’ll be wishing that her decisions as Chancellor would be just as easy to edit as her LinkedIn page.