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.

Ms Reeves was born in south-east London in 1979, the daughter of two primary-school teachers. Her younger sister Ellie is also a Labour member of parliament; she is now the party’s deputy campaigns co-ordinator. After Oxford (where she read politics, philosophy and economics) and the London School of Economics (where she got an MSc in economics) Rachel Reeves joined the Bank of England as an economist; her time there included a stint at the British embassy in Washington, DC. She became an MP in 2010 for the constituency of Leeds West in Yorkshire.