The Rachel Reeves chess scandal feels a bit stale, mate

To call Rachel Reeves beleaguered is like saying that the Titanic had some flotation issues, or Apollo 13 experienced technical difficulties. At this stage, her role in government is not so much chancellor as lightning rod.

Reeves seems to be under attack from all sides. Lots of people think she should resign, but aren’t quite clear as to whether that’s for not raising income tax, thinking about raising income tax, hiding good news or suppressing bad news, or something else entirely.

So when The Times, still the closest thing the UK has to a newspaper of record, found a new scandal involving her, Reeves might surely have been worried. At least until she read the headline on Tim Witherow’s piece: “Rachel Reeves accused of overstating junior chess title.”

If Reeves, 46, had been moonlighting as a junior chess player that would be quite the scandal indeed, but the reality seems more mundane. At the core of the row is that Reeves once claimed she was the “British Girls U-14 chess champion” simply because she won the under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association (BWCA) Girls Championship.

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But according to Professor Alex Edmans, a 45-year-old male economist and writer who also played chess as a child, that is not good enough. Edelman, whose 2020 book Grow The Pie provided a short-lived catchphrase for Liz Truss, has gone to the Times because he believes only the girl who performed best in the British mixed-sex youth tournament has the right to call herself the girls’ champion.

He told Witherow that a championship for British girls staged by the body for British women’s chess “is not the British girls’ championship, it is clearly defined as the girl who does best in the British championship. She may well have won titles, but the title of British girls’ champion is a specific event. The BWCA has its own championship and then you are the BWCA champion.”

Anyway, the media seems to agree that the scandal of Reeves calling herself a girls’ chess champion just because she won a girls’ chess tournament is quite the bombshell. The Times story has already been picked up by right-leaning titles like the Spectator and Telegraph.

So, Reeves is apparently in check again. But even mired as she is, this one seems unlikely to mate her.