When it rains for Rachel Reeves, it pours. This time it isn’t revelations about the now-Chancellor’s apparently plagiarised book or her false LinkedIn ‘economist’ claims or, er, accusations she misrepresented the state of the national finances. No, now her chess ability has come under scrutiny. A former junior champion has hit out at Reeves over her claims she was a girls’ under-14 champion herself – claiming she was much nearer the bottom of the scoreboard when she played. Ouch.

Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the London Business School, has taken issue with Reeves’s assertion that she was a top chess player in her youth. A year before Labour’s landslide general election victory, Reeves told the Guardian that: ‘I am – I was – a geek. I played chess. I was the British girls’ under-1

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