There are lies, evasions and manipulations by politicians that, when they come to light, can make the politician in question seem even less relatable than the average. (So many to choose from, but I’m thinking in particular of Boris Johnson’s weird ad-hoc claim to relax by making models of buses). And then there are the exaggerations that can make a politician seem mildly more human, one of which, I would suggest, is CV inflation – the tweaking of one’s professional details to look better than they actually are. Didn’t Rachel Reeves spend “a decade” working at the Bank of England in the same way that, in our resumes, we are all at some level fluent in French?
The exact breakdown of how Reeves spent her working life in her 20s and 30s has, over the past week or so, been pored over by journalists looking for inconsistencies after it emerged that she may have rounded up somewhat in the details. According to the website Guido Fawkes, when Reeves claimed to have worked as an “economist” at the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) straight out of university, she had, in fact, been in an administrative role that mainly managed complaints and small projects. After more digging, the website claimed that Reeves, possibly alerted to the fact that she’d been busted, changed her LinkedIn profile so that “economist” became “retail banking”. Then the Telegraph piled in asserting that Reeves’s claim to have spent “a decade” at the Bank of England was actually more like six years. (It was also later suggested on X that one of those years was spent studying for a masters at LSE).
It is hard not to smile at the modest reach of Reeves’s tweaks which, as political tweaks go, aren’t quite up there with “£350m a week to the NHS” or “we never had a party at Downing Street”. Still, changing the wording on her LinkedIn CV indicates that some kind of reverse-ferret has occurred. The episode will have struck many people with an instant feeling of recognition at Reeves’s pivot from an unshaded term such as “economist” to much woollier catch-all language familiar to anyone who has ever applied for a job. Ah yes, “retail banking”, a term that, like “management oversight” or “team leadership”, can do almost infinite heavy lifting without the need to go too granular on the specifics. There is the English language and there is the language of CVs, and while in real life you are occasionally unlucky enough to meet people who use “onboarding” or “buy-in” as a part of their regular speech, the two languages don’t tend to meet.
And yet, without realising it, most of us are fully bilingual (or rather trilingual, because of course we are all fluent in French, plus conversational in Spanish). Did you complete an extremely unimpressive Duke of Edinburgh bronze award at school? And did that award, unpacked in your university application, turn into an account of how you in effect ran the Roman empire, or got an insight into the impact of agricultural policy on [insert specifics of your course requirements here]? Did you contribute a single article to your university newspaper or do a day on a TV station that gave you unique insights into how media ad-revenue may be moving from the local TV space to podcasts?
Perhaps you babysat occasionally for some younger kids in your neighbourhood. Or, as you explained in the section of your job application on prior experience of the workforce, ran a company that entailed marketing, catering, payroll and child development duties? As we age and the stakes increase, the temptation to fluff our experience only gets worse, until we find ourselves half-convinced that our entry-level jobs actually entailed c-suite-level pressures and decision-making, a conviction that is completely OK as long as we aren’t pilots or surgeons. After all, it all happened a very long time ago. Who is to say, in real terms, what actually took place? What is “truth” or “time” when we experience these phenomena differently?
Anyway, at the very least we’ve all had to make up hobbies and interests. (Not model bus-making, obviously; usually some kind of PE to cover the truthful answer to the question “how do you like to spend your spare time” which is, obviously, “scrolling”). I have never, to my knowledge, been an economist at the Bank of England, but then again, who knows. In the bendy reality that governs CVs, almost anything is possible.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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