Rachel Reeves was earmarked as a “rising star” in the Labour Party from the moment she was elected in 2010. Look back at any newspaper or magazine’s list of “politicians to watch” from a decade ago and there she is: the new MP for Leeds West, a former Bank of England economist, Oxford PPE-ist and child chess champion, the “youngest and the brightest” of the bright young things. She was “Labour’s bright star”, as one paper put it: one of the party’s great hopes for a return to government after its election defeat under Gordon Brown.
“I got promoted by Ed [Miliband] on to the front bench less than six months, I think, after I became an MP,” Reeves recalls when we speak. “A year later, I was in the shadow cabinet. It was great. I just felt like I was on an upward escalator and I thought we were going to win the [2015] election”.
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