It’s that drive that has taken Reeves, 45, from a comprehensive school in Beckenham to 11 Downing St. as the first woman to take charge of Britain’s finances following the Labour Party’s landslide win in Thursday’s general election.
The UK’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, had an early taste for breaking glass ceilings.
Growing up in south London in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s, the state-educated girl who would rise to become the nation’s finance minister took pride in beating all-comers — mostly boys who went to fee-paying schools — in local chess tournaments. “There was a lot of snobbery,” she recalled years later. “I was just as good as them and I was going to prove it.”
