When Neil Kinnock’s Labour suffered a humiliating shock defeat to John Major’s Tories in 1992, he would not have known that a school mock election coinciding with the national vote would launch two of his party’s future stars.
At Cator Park School for Girls, in Beckenham, a 13-year-old Rachel Reeves decided to run in the mock election. Her campaign manager was her sister Ellie, who was a year younger.
Now Rachel is chancellor of the exchequer, while Ellie is chair of the Labour Party. Both are pivotal figures in Keir Starmer’s top team and were hand-picked by him to change the country and make the party a winning machine.
The last time two siblings were so powerful was when David Miliband was foreign secretary and his younger brother Ed was environment secretary in Gordon Brown’s government. In the case of the Milibands it did not end well, with Ed beating David in the 2010 leadership election in bitter circumstances.
But, unlike the Milibands, the two Reeves sisters were not brought up in a politically obsessive household, Ellie Reeves has revealed in an exclusive interview with The Independent.
“I wouldn’t say we’re from a particularly political family. My parents were teachers. My dad was really involved with the NUT [National Union of Teachers]. He was branch chair of Bromley NUT. But, to be honest, he didn’t really talk about politics because I think he was firmly of the view that he didn’t want to project his views onto us.
“It was for us to make our own minds up about what our values were and what our political beliefs were. So although he did have some very strongly held views, and I can remember, for example, during the 1987 general election the news being on and Neil Kinnock being on the news, and my dad saying: ‘That’s who we vote for.’
“But that’s really the only time that I can remember as a young girl discussing politics.”
Roll on five years from that general election to another in 1992 and the two sisters were discovering themselves in roles which have echoes of their jobs today.
“I can remember the 1992 general election, and we were at school, and they had a mock election. Rachel put herself forward for this mock election, and I was her campaign manager… She put me in charge of the leaflets, stickers and things like that to give out.”
But at that time there were real-life issues which were shaping their politics more. The Tories crashed the economy with a run on the pound, which sent interest rates spiralling, having a defining impact on the Reeves family.
“I can remember my mum at the end of every month getting her credit card bill and having to go through her bank account, really carefully matching everything up, making sure there was enough left at the end. I can remember how interest rates shot through the roof in the early 90s. There’d be this sort of despair about how to pay the mortgage.”
Ellie joined Labour aged 15 in the mid-1990s while Rachel joined as a teenager too, before they both went on to Oxford University.
Rachel has the more senior job, currently, after winning her seat in Leeds West and Pudsey, while Ellie has the family’s home seat in Lewisham.
But Ellie insists that for one important reason there was no serious rivalry while they were growing up.
“[Rachel] would always win at everything,” Ellie said, laughing. In particular, Rachel was British girls under-14s chess champion.
Despite their rapid rise to the top of the new Labour government, Ellie is still modest about their achievements and laughs when they are described as “Britain’s most powerful sister act”.
“We’re pretty normal women from southeast London. I have had to pinch myself a few times since the election, that’s for sure,” she said.
