Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves: ‘Attack is the best form of defence’

Credit: Ian Tovey

‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ declares Rachel Reeves, sitting in a block purple dress in her office in parliament. The shadow chancellor is discussing what lessons for politics she learnt from chess. She was the British girls’ champion at the age of 14. ‘Thinking ahead. Trying to think what your opponent might do – and how you would respond to that. I was a very aggressive chess player: attack, attack, attack. All the time!’

She has kept such tactics since she entered politics, having previously been an economist at the Bank of England. Her early call for a windfall tax saw her named ‘Chancellor of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards last month, on the grounds that, in the year of four Tory chancellors, her policies had the most intellectual influence. The award hangs behind her desk.

The idea, she says, struck her long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She could foresee an energy price surge which would profit companies and hit consumers hard. A textbook case, she thought, for a windfall tax. ‘Most of my Christmas recess last year was spent on calls and asking people to write me papers,’ she says. ‘I spoke to some former people at BP and Shell, former economics teachers of mine at university. We looked back at what Thatcher, Osborne and Brown did and I was convinced that if it was a genuine windfall profit, the evidence shows that it doesn’t have an adverse effect.’

After meeting with Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband – the shadow energy secretary – they decided to call for a windfall tax in January this year in a bid to be ‘three moves ahead’. ‘Like with all these things, often you think, “well the government are going to have to do it. But if we get there sooner, we’ll get some of the credit,”’ explains Reeves.

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