Starmer met Reeves over breakfast shortly before he became party leader and decided she had to be in his shadow cabinet, according to Get In, a recent book on Starmer’s journey to Downing Street.
Steve Richards, a journalist and author of several books on British political history, observed that they “really didn’t know each other” before he picked her as his shadow chancellor.
That’s in stark contrast to the rapport built up between the Tories’ David Cameron and George Osborne — or Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (whose own relationship would later veer off-course.)
Starmer “soon decided that [Reeves] was a figure who needed little scrutiny,” said Richards. “He revered her and gave her more space than any equivalent shadow chancellor.”
Rupert Harrison, who advised Osborne as chancellor, said it was essential to his boss’s time in office that Cameron and Osborne had “a strategy underpinned by the relationship between them.” Cameron was, he said, “incredibly personally committed to what we were doing on the economy.”
Reeves’ rise has continued since Labour took office and she became Britain’s first-ever female chancellor.