Rachel Reeves is not alone in inflating her résumé

In brITAIN the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has lately been in a spot of bother about stories from her past. She has been accused of over-egging her résumé. She has repeatedly claimed that she spent “the best part of a decade” as an economist at the Bank of England; in fact, she worked there for five-and-a-half years (nine months less than was claimed on her LinkedIn profile). She is also facing questions over her expenses claims during her time with HBOS, a bank, where she worked from 2006 to 2009. All this comes on top of the earlier embarrassment of the discovery by the Financial Times that chunks of her book on female economists, published in 2023, had been copied from other sources without acknowledgment.