Rachel Reeves has been Chancellor of the Exchequer since July 2024, the first woman to hold the office. Before politics, she worked at the Bank of England and HBOS. Before that, Oxford PPE. The CV reads exactly as the modern Treasury would draft it.

Her route to office was orthodox. MP for Leeds West from 2010, redrawn as Leeds West and Pudsey at the 2024 boundary changes, junior shadow roles under Miliband, Shadow Chief Secretary, time on the backbenches during the Corbyn years, Shadow Chancellor under Starmer from 2021. She positioned Labour to be trusted with public finances in a way the party had not been trusted since 2010, and the 2024 result was partly the reward for that work.

Office has been harder. The first Budget identified what she called a £22 billion fiscal hole inherited from the Conservatives and responded with tax rises on employer NI, on inheritance, and changes to pensioner winter fuel payments. The rhetoric was about tough choices. The political effect was a sharp drop in business confidence, a softening of growth forecasts, and the loss of much of the goodwill she had built in opposition.

The winter fuel decision was the worst political call of her early tenure. Means testing the payment generated a backlash she did not see coming and partially reversed under pressure. The episode revealed a political weakness that her CV had hidden. Reeves understands fiscal arithmetic and is comfortable with the Treasury orthodoxy. She is less practised at the politics of explaining a hard choice to people who do not read the OBR forecasts.

The inheritance tax changes for family farms became a similar problem. The substantive policy case can be made. The political case was made badly. Farmers organised, the press picked up the story, and the government found itself defending a measure that polled badly with voters it could not afford to alienate.

There are also the recurring questions about her CV claims, the HBOS expenses scrutiny from her time there, and the 2025 row about letting out her London property without the necessary licence while pushing reforms on landlords. None of these is a single political event large enough to define her. Taken together they have produced a steady drag on her authority that an Iron Chancellor brand cannot entirely shake off.

Her economic strategy is essentially Treasury orthodoxy with a Labour ribbon on it. Fiscal rules, stability messaging, OBR discipline.

On her fiscal rules she changed the framework she had pledged to keep. In opposition she presented her rules as "iron clad" and committed Labour to getting debt falling on the same measure the Conservatives used. In her first Budget on 30 October 2024 she redefined the debt target to public sector net financial liabilities, a change that freed up tens of billions of pounds of extra borrowing by excluding the value of new assets from the headline debt figure. The substantive case for this is that Britain cannot afford another bond market accident like the Truss episode. The substantive case against is that orthodoxy alone will not generate growth in an economy that has not seriously grown since 2008.

She inherited a difficult brief and has not made it worse in the way her immediate predecessor did. That is a real but small achievement. The political question is whether her version of caution produces growth voters can feel, or whether her Chancellorship ends as a competent management of a long stagnation.