When it rains for Rachel Reeves, it pours. This time it isn’t revelations about the now-Chancellor’s apparently plagiarised book or her false LinkedIn ‘economist’ claims or, er, accusations she misrepresented the state of the national finances. No, now her chess ability has come under scrutiny. A former junior champion has hit out at Reeves over her claims she was a girls’ under-14 champion herself – claiming she was much nearer the bottom of the scoreboard when she played. Ouch.
Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the London Business School, has taken issue with Reeves’s assertion that she was a top chess player in her youth. A year before Labour’s landslide general election victory, Reeves told the Guardian that: ‘I am – I was – a geek. I played chess. I was the British girls’ under-14 champion.’ But Edmans has pulled up the Chancellor over the specifics – writing on Twitter that ‘in reality, she was joint 26th out of 34 in that tournament’. It’s quite the difference…
It turns out Edmans is correct – according to a British Chess game archive, the winner of the British girls’ under-14 contest in 1993 was Emily Howard, a composer. But that’s not to say Reeves wasn’t a chess winner at that age: she did, in fact, soar to victory in the British Women’s Chess Association (BWCA) Girls Championship and win the under-14 title. But there is an important distinction to make, Edmans argued, telling the Times that: ‘[The BWCA contest] is not the British girls’ championship, it is clearly define as the girl who does best in the British championship.’ He added:
She may well have won titles, but the title of British girls’ champion is a specific event. The BWCA has its own championship and then you are the BWCA champion.
The Chancellor’s claim has proven controversial in the chess world, however, with international master and director of international chess for the English Chess Federation, Malcolm Pein, suggesting Reeves’s assertion was correct. He insisted: ‘The BWCA competition was, in my view, the only credible girls championship, as it was for girls only, as opposed to being subsumed into the Open British U14 Championships where 90 per cent or so of the players were boys, as was the rather discriminatory practice of the British Chess Federation 30 years ago.’
For her part, a source close to Reeves denied she had misrepresented her record. The Chancellor has not yet commented on the matter herself but Mr S supposes she has bigger things on her plate this week – like, er, fighting off claims she misled the country over Britain’s blackhole. There’s never a quiet day, eh?
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