Rachel Reeves Goes for Growth as UK’s First Female Chancellor

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.”

Rachel Reeves has become the UK’s first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg

It’s that drive that has taken Reeves, 45, from a comprehensive school in Beckenham ...