Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves entered Parliament as MP for Leeds West in 2010, served as Shadow Chancellor, and became the first woman to hold the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer when Labour won power in July 2024. Her tenure was built on fiscal rules, infrastructure spending and a growth agenda into which she folded technology policy.

That growth framing showed most clearly around the Sovereign AI Fund's launch on 16 April 2026, when she named a 'thriving domestic AI sector' as one of her three central economic choices, giving the £500m programme Treasury-level cover that signalled it would survive budget pressure even though DSIT ran it day to day. A week later she co-launched the permanent Defence Investors' Advisory Group with then-Defence Secretary John Healey, aimed at defence startups with no prior MOD contracts.

She was among the ministers closest to Keir Starmer that Andy Burnham dropped rather than reshuffled when he formed his own government in July 2026; Healey, whose own Sprint and Zig-Zag schemes she had helped launch, succeeded her at the Treasury.