Rachel Reeves has been caught misleading voters yet again about her previous work before entering politics in yet another embarrassing error.
The Chancellor’s ‘Who’s Who’ entry claimed she was previously a contributor to the Journal of Political Economy, a prestigious and highly selective journal featuring only the best quality academic articles.
It’s now been revealed she in fact wrote for the European Journal of Political Economy, a difference described as akin to that between Oxford University and the former Polytechnic Oxford Brooks.
The entry also repeats her now-disproven claim to have worked at the Bank of England until 2009, when she actually left in 2006 after just five and a half years.
Who’s Who is the UK’s most prominent directory of prominent figures, having been published since 1849 and includes more than 33,000 biographies.
Rachel Reeves has been caught out yet again (Image: Getty)
Since 1897 entries have been compiled from questionnaires filled in by their subjects, which the founders claimed leads to improved accuracy.
Therefore the inaccuracy in Ms Reeves’ entry suggests she was once again responsible for an embellishment.
The Journal of Political Economy has no record of any article by Ms Reeves, however a former Bank colleague published a paper in 2007 in the European Journal of Political Economy.
While articles in the former are cited an average of 6.9 times a year, the latter is cited just 2.3 times a year.
Academic Sir Richard Barnett explained the difference as “chalk and cheese”.
This is at least the third error from Ms Reeves unearthed (Image: Getty)
“One is world leading, it’s where economists aspire to publish and it’s incredibly competitive to get published in the Journal of Political Economy — if you’re seeking an academic post or a professorship where you’ve published matters as much as what you’ve published.”
“If she is a serious economist she must know the difference between the two.”
He added that an academic who made such a mistake on their job application would not be considered for the post.
Ms Reeves’ Who’s Who entry has been regularly updated, most recently in 2019 nine years after she first appeared.
The corporation found she was out by around nine months on her Linkedin profile.
This in turn came after she was forced to amend the title of her role working at HBOS, from an economist to merely “retail banking”.
She in fact worked in the complaints team.
Her team has repeatedly claimed these have been down to errors by staff.
