BBC finally covering Reeves’s ‘expenses scandal’ – but leaves out key detail

BBC coverage of investigation into Reeves’s and colleagues’ spending omits important information

The BBC has finally caught up with independent media and has covered the expenses scandal – the description used by a former senior boss at HBOS – in which right-wing Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves, then a mid-senior manager at HBOS, and two other managers at the bank, again in the words of retired boss Kevin Gillett, ‘nearly got sacked’ because of it:

Nearly got sacked due to an expenses scandal where the 3 senior managers were all signing off each others [sic] expenses. Narrow escape.

Skwawkbox and other independent media covered the scandal last year, along with Reeves’s false claims about her position at the bank – she had claimed to have worked as an economist for HBOS but was in fact a customer service manager.

The BBC goes into some detail on the bank’s 2009 investigation into Reeves’s spending on expenses, including items such as handbags and perfume, and claiming the cost of Christmas presents – and it notes that the investigation corroborated a whistleblower’s complaints and found that there was ‘apparent evidence of wrongdoing’. It then adds that the investigation appeared not to have been concluded and that Reeves denies knowing about it and left the bank a little later.

But it leaves out one key part of Gillett’s allegations.

In his 2024 post about the scandal, Gillett added that, after ‘nearly getting sacked’ over expenses, Reeves was again caught out – allegedly taking so much time off for so many doctor and dentist appointments that someone followed her on one such occasion – and found that Reeves was doing council business as a local councillor; when she was confronted, she resigned her position:

[She t]hen had lots of doctors/dentists visits. So she was followed. Turns out she was
doing labour council business. When shown the facts. She resigned. #facts.

Reeves quit the bank in May 2009, providing a potential or even likely reason why the expenses investigation never formally concluded, but the BBC passes over this, weakening the impact of its coverage.

The BBC also mentions that Reeves made another false claim about her banking employment record. In a separate article, the BBC also points out that Reeves also exaggerated the length of time she had worked for the Bank of England by several months on Linkedin and that her team had made an skims over this by saying that this had been an ‘administrative error by her team’.

However, the article notes that she has also personally repeatedly claimed, during speeches at various times, to have worked ‘for a decade’ and ‘for the best part of a decade’ for the Bank of England – a considerable stretch from the five years and seven months she actually spent with it.

Reeves’s history as an MP does little to mitigate against such allegations. In 2023 she was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal after eagle-eyed critics spotted that she had lifted at least twenty sections of Wikipedia wholesale for ‘her’ new book:

Reeves’s new book lifts whole Wikipedia sections

She was also disciplined by parliamentary standards body IPSA and had her MP’s credit card suspended for excessive use. In September 2024 she was found to have reported thousands in donations of designer clothes from multimillionaire Labour peer Lord Alli – but described the donation as ‘office support’:

Reeves, Rayner disguised £000s cash for clothes as ‘office support’ etc

Reeves has also claimed to have resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet when she was never in it – and in October 2024 she was rebuked by Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle for a ‘totally unacceptable’ breach of the ministerial code when she gave information to US journalists about her approaching Budget before informing UK lawmakers.

In a functioning democracy, any of the above allegations and admissions would lead to Reeves’s immediate resignation or sacking. Under Keir Starmer she is likely to try to hang on with the support of her red-Tory boss, who campaigned for the Labour leadership on a slogan of ‘integrity’ before going on to break every campaign promise and has lied repeatedly since, while protecting racists, sex pests and abusers and covering up a whistleblower’s allegations of ‘sadistic’ and ‘criminal’ abuse of vulnerable women by an MP’s staffer and alleged lover.

After all, Starmer is hardly a stranger to shadowy donations and questionable declarations himself and will want to keep her in place so she can keep imposing consciously-cruel cuts on the UK’s vulnerable and enriching billionaires while enjoying publicly-funded heating and donor-funded perks ‘office support’.

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