How Rachel Reeves, Britain’s probable next chancellor, wants to change the country

AS A STUDENT at Oxford University in the late 1990s, Rachel Reeves’s friends gave her a framed photograph of Gordon Brown, then the Labour chancellor, to hang in her college room. “They knew how much I loved the Treasury,” she later recalled. Unless the polls are very wrong, Labour will sweep to power on July 4th after 14 years out of office. Credit will belong, in large part, to Ms Reeves’s work in changing perceptions of a party once seen as fiscally reckless and hostile to business. Her reward will be the fulfilment of a long-held dream: becoming Britain’s first female chancellor.