In brITAIN the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has lately been in a spot of bother about stories from her past. She has been accused of over-egging her résumé. She has repeatedly claimed that she spent “the best part of a decade” as an economist at the Bank of England; in fact, she worked there for five-and-a-half years (nine months less than was claimed on her LinkedIn profile). She is also facing questions over her expenses claims during her time with HBOS, a bank, where she worked from 2006 to 2009. All this comes on top of the earlier embarrassment of the discovery by the Financial Times that chunks of her book on female economists, published in 2023, had been copied from other sources without acknowledgment.
Ms Reeves’s exaggerations are mild by global standards. All around the world, politicians are wont to puff up their past.
Take America. The most glaring recent example is that of George Santos, a former Republican congressman from Long Island. In December 2023 Mr Santos became only the sixth member of Congress to be expelled from the chamber. Many of the stories he told about his past, including his education, supposed career at Goldman Sachs, business success or that he was Jewish, were fiction, as were some of his claimed campaign expenses. His excuse: “Most people lie on their résumés.”
At the very top, President Donald Trump is something of an exaggerator-in-chief. In his campaign for the 2020 election he claimed that he was once named “man of the year” in Michigan; there seems to be no such award. President Joe Biden came a cropper in one presidential campaign for plagiarising passages of a speech from Neil Kinnock, a former Labour leader in Britain; he also exaggerated his academic credentials, saying he graduated in the top half of his law-school class (he came 76th out of 85). Such fibs are no bar to becoming leader of the free world.
Nor to becoming president of the Philippines. There, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos claimed to have a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University; in fact he never completed his degree and was instead awarded a diploma in social studies. In Pakistan a probe in 2010 found that dozens of lawmakers had fake degrees.
Elsewhere in Asia, the most prominent leaders have thrived despite questions over their academic records. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, faces continuing controversy over whether he really has degrees from Delhi University and Gujarat University. And in China there have long been suspicions that President Xi Jinping had help with his doctor-of-law degree from Tsinghua University.
For lesser politicians, it is true, exaggerating credentials can be career-destroying. In South Africa, for example, Pallo Jordan, an African National Congress MP who had been a minister under Nelson Mandela, resigned in 2014 because his claimed doctorate was revealed to be fake. In Israel Esterina Tartman withdrew as a nominee for tourism minister in 2007 after revelations that she had never enrolled at two universities where she had claimed to have earned advanced degrees. Barry Urban, a British-born MP from Western Australia, was sentenced to three years in jail in 2021 for lies about his university qualifications and military service. The judge called him “the real-life Pinocchio of parliament”.
Degrees of dishonesty
Europe is rich in examples, too. A spate of PhD-plagiarism scandals in Germany included the resignation of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as defence minister in 2011. Germany’s current foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has faced scrutiny for lapses akin to those of Ms Reeves. Elsewhere in northern Europe, in Norway two ministers (Ingvild Kjerkol and Sandra Borch, responsible for health and higher education respectively) stepped down in 2024 for plagiarising master’s theses. In the south Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister from 2018 to 2021, claimed on his CV that he had “deepened” his legal studies at universities that had no record of him. Pablo Casado, Spain’s opposition leader at a similar time, faced allegations of dodgy degree claims.
To the east Aleksander Kwasniewski, post-communist Poland’s second president, never completed his thesis for the master’s degree he claimed to have during the presidential race in 1995; whether his claim swung the vote remains controversial. In Russia President Vladimir Putin appears to be one of the many politicians suspected of plagiarising their dissertations. In 2006 Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy, from the Brookings Institution, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, dug out a copy of Mr Putin’s work and found that more than 16 pages of text were taken verbatim from an American textbook: “This is plagiarism at any level of US higher education,” they concluded. Oddly, officials in Russia have not kicked up a fuss.
Back in Britain, Conservatives might want to beware of throwing stones at Ms Reeves. There is no shortage of examples of Tory politicians who have embellished or lied about their past, from Jeffrey Archer (famous for fiction, after all) to Grant Shapps (a former defence secretary who hid a past career behind a pseudonym) and Andrea Leadsom (whose campaign to be party leader was hit by reports that she had bigged up her career in banking). The chancellor’s time at HBOS may offer a better line of attack—if not for her expenses claims, then for her association with a bank that failed spectacularly. ■
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