Does anyone care about Rachel Reeves’ CV?

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / Christ, and how about Rachel Reeves’ stint at the Treasury?”

While not a word-for-word transcript, this is what much of the Conservative-leaning press has been sounding like for the last few weeks. The story, if you missed it, is this: the chancellor once described herself as a former “economist at the Bank of Scotland”. As it turns out, her role there was instead better described as “retail banking at the Bank of Scotland”.

Did you fall from your chair while reading this? Faint, perhaps? Have you now recovered? Did a snifter of brandy do the trick? Good, then we shall continue. Rachel Reeves worked at the Bank of England for six years in the 2000s. She did, however, once mention in an interview with Stylist in 2021 her “decade [spent] as an economist at the Bank of England”. Hopefully you kept the bottle of brandy close at hand.

Now, at risk of stating the obvious, these stories aren’t very big at all. Reeves probably should have been more precise in her wording on these two occasions, but it hardly is the end of the world. In a past life, a cheeky diary column may have enjoyed running quite an acidic column on the topic. It would have been discussed by parliamentary wags for a day or two, then disappeared again.

Instead, the scandal, as that is what we are apparently calling it, has been making the headlines in the Sun, the Telegraph, GB News, Guido Fawkes, the Spectator, the Daily Express and assorted clickbait merchants for nearly a month. Were you to only read or watch those outlets and channels – or listen to lame quips by Lee Anderson and others at PMQs – you’d be forgiven for believing that it currently is one of the biggest stories in the country.

It has been an interesting phenomenon to witness. Of course, there is very little to the story itself, and “right wing press dislikes Labour politician” hardly is a novel development. Still, CVgate is worth exploring in a bit more depth, if only to look at what it reveals.

Firstly, it isn’t the first time the Tory press has tried to create a career-ruining mistake out of thin air. As you may remember, they spent some time with their teeth sunk into an allegedly dodgy deal Angela Rayner made with regards to her flat. If the details now seem fuzzy, it probably is because there was very little to it.

Similarly, “BeerGate”, whereby Keir Starmer and colleagues were found to not have actually broken the law during the pandemic, blighted our lives and their frontpages for some time. What we can learn from this is that, sadly, it is only the beginning. The Labour party have been in power for under six months but it seems likely that these controversies, built out of papier mache and held together by gum and resentment, will just keep coming.

Secondly, and on a more positive note, the good news seems to be that… well, no-one cares. The Tory papers screamed and screamed and still no-one paid any particular attention to BeerGate, and no-one tried to actually understand what the deal was with Rayner’s flat, and no-one seems to care about the contents of Reeves’ CV. Once reigning supreme, Fleet Street’s right flank can no longer claim to make the political weather in the way it once did. It has been trying and trying but, so far, nothing has stuck.

Finally, what these decidedly unscandalous scandals show is that Westminster is having a hard time getting used to things having returned to normal. The decade of Tory chaos has ended and politics is mostly quite dull now. Normal people have stopped caring about whatever goes on in Parliament, and SW1 dwellers no longer need to run around like headless chickens.

Hungry hacks may be trying to keep the adrenaline pumping by building endless shocking stories out of nothing, but the only thing it is achieving is keeping them busy. The harsh truth is that the eyes and ears of the nation were, for a time, fixated on them, but that is no longer the case.

This is why stories about Reeves’ CV, Rayner’s flat, or Lisa Nandy’s gerbil should be seen as what they are; partisan attacks, sure, but mostly just desperate cries for attention.