Rachel Reeves Accused of Lying Over “Chess Champion” Claims

Rachel Reeves has been accused of lying by exaggerating her chess achievements in a row over her claim she was “British girls’ under-14 champion”. The Telegraph has more.

The Chancellor, who was a keen player as a child, has argued her flair for the game at a young age set her up to be a good politician.

But she has been accused of overstating her credentials by claiming she held a title that she technically never achieved.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2023, Ms Reeves said: “I played chess. I was the British girls’ under-14 champion.”

However, Alex Edmans, a former junior chess champion, has claimed that she only came “joint 26th out of 34” in the mixed-gender British championships.

He said that he had “never heard” of Ms Reeves as a young player, even though she was only a year his senior, and said her claim about being the under-14 champion was “false”.

In reality, the Chancellor won the under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association (BWCA) Girls Championship.

This is different from the “British girls’ championship”, which is “clearly defined as the girl who does best in the (mixed-gender) British championship”, Mr Edmans said.

Records show that Ms Reeves placed joint 26th in the British under-14 championships in 1993. Emily Howard, the composer, placed first out of the girls, making her the official “British girls’ under-14 champion”.

In comments reported by the Times, he said: “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.”

A source close to Ms Reeves said the idea she had misled people about her chess credentials was “for the birds”.

Malcolm Pein, an international chess master and Director at the English Chess Federation, also disagreed with Mr Edmans.

He said: “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% or so of the players were boys, as was the rather discriminatory practice of the British Chess Federation 30 years ago.”

The Chancellor has made political hay of her childhood achievements, posing with a chessboard in the run-up to the autumn Budget and producing a video about her love for the game in 2023.

Sharing the clip on social media, she said: “My dad taught me how to play chess at the age of seven and since then I’ve had the chess bug.

“Chess has taught me so many things which are useful in politics, from being strategic to giving me that competitive streak.”

Edmans, however, is unconvinced that Reeves has learnt anything from her love of the Game of Kings:

I played for the England junior chess team, was British Squad Champion and London Junior Champion, but had never heard of Rachel Reeves, even though she was only a year above me. Newspaper claims that she was British U14 girls’ champion are false; she came 26th out of 34 in that tournament.

Yet these claims have been widely repeated due to the narrative fallacy – the appealing story that she’d be a great Chancellor because chess teaches:

♙ the discipline to evaluate risks before making a move
♘ the ability to maintain a consistent long-term strategy rather than lurch between short-term fixes
♗ the realism to play the position on the board rather than misrepresent it or blame others for it
♖ the judgement to play the strongest move, not the flashiest one
♕ the capacity to think several moves ahead and foresee second-order effects

If chess really shaped her approach, it’s hard to see it on the board.

Ouch!

It adds to the picture of a Chancellor whose relationship with the truth is often strained. As the Telegraph reminds us:

It is not the first time Ms Reeves has been accused of inflating her achievements, with the Chancellor previously under fire for false statements about her job history.

Last year, she quietly updated her profile on LinkedIn to remove a claim she worked as an economist at the Bank of Scotland between 2006 and 2009.

It was changed to say that her role was in “retail banking” at Halifax, prompting allegations she had been “economical with the truth”.

Ms Reeves has also been accused of exaggerating how long she spent working at the Bank of England. Speaking to Stylist magazine in 2021, the Chancellor said she had spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank and “loved it”.

But her LinkedIn profile states that she worked for the Bank for around six years, with a start date of 2000 and an end date of 2006.

She also admitted making mistakes in 2023 after her new book was found to include a number of passages from Wikipedia.

However, the story could end up being an own goal for Reeves’s critics, as it draws attention to the fact that the Chancellor did win a national women’s chess championship as a youngster, while the exaggeration claim has the feeling of a technicality – a view backed up by Malcolm Pein of the ECF.

Still, it may be another strand to the narrative of a Chancellor who’s not averse to being economical with the truth when it benefits her.

The Telegraph article is worth reading in full.