"There is nothing new under the sun," said John Rentoul in The Independent, but if you are writing a book, you do need to try to put the old words into a fresh order.
That was a lesson that Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, learnt to her cost last week, when the FT found that chunks of her new book, "The Women Who Made Modern Economics", had seemingly been lifted, unacknowledged, from Wikipedia, an obituary in The Guardian, and "even the writing of a Labour frontbench colleague", Hilary Benn.
'Rhetorical extravagance'
It's very embarrassing, but Reeves is not the first politician to be caught copying. During his 1988 White House bid, Joe Biden told an audience that he was the first Biden in "a thousand generations" (i.e. since the latter part of the Stone Age) to have had a college education – a piece of "rhetorical extravagance" that turned out to have been taken from a speech by ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock. The fuss derailed Biden's bid, but he bounced back. Chances are that Reeves will too.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
It's actually very common for politicians to have not written sections of the books that bear their names, said Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times. They are busy people, and writing books is a job they can delegate to staff ("some of whom will be working at taxpayers' expense").
'Instructive reality check'
As Reeves implied last week, it was almost certainly a research assistant who'd produced the errant cuttings, perhaps without explaining where they'd come from. Since she is the book's author, she had to accept that the buck stopped with her, yet she was not entirely repentant. If the result of her failure to cite her sources was a book about "amazing women" that "gets read", she said, then she is "proud of that". Which is a great line, and one I may use myself one day, said Ivers.
In future, more publishers may use software to spot such copying, said the FT. Currently, they are reliant on the authors being honest and diligent in their efforts to avoid inadvertent plagiarism, and on their editors having the skills to spot "anything that looks unusual". But given the volume of material that authors can access in the digital age, it is not easy; and with the rise of AI-generated text, it is only going to get harder. As one industry insider put it, the Reeves affair is an "instructive reality check".
-
‘It is their greed and the pollution from their products that hurt consumers’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Jane Austen lives on at these timeless hotelsThe Week Recommends Here’s where to celebrate the writing legend’s 250th birthday
-
‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham and ‘When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’ by David Margolickfeature A chronicle of Mexico’s shifts in power and how Sid Caesar shaped the early days of television
-
The military: When is an order illegal?Feature Trump is making the military’s ‘most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts’
-
Ukraine and Rubio rewrite Russia’s peace planFeature The only explanation for this confusing series of events is that ‘rival factions’ within the White House fought over the peace plan ‘and made a mess of it’
-
The launch of Your Party: how it could workThe Explainer Despite landmark decisions made over the party’s makeup at their first conference, core frustrations are ‘likely to only intensify in the near-future’
-
The US-Saudi relationship: too big to fail?Talking Point With the Saudis investing $1 trillion into the US, and Trump granting them ‘major non-Nato ally’ status, for now the two countries need each other
-
Nigel Farage: was he a teenage racist?Talking Point Farage’s denials have been ‘slippery’, but should claims from Reform leader’s schooldays be on the news agenda?
-
What does the fall in net migration mean for the UK?Today’s Big Question With Labour and the Tories trying to ‘claim credit’ for lower figures, the ‘underlying picture is far less clear-cut’
-
Tariffs: Will Trump’s reversal lower prices?Feature Retailers may not pass on the savings from tariff reductions to consumers
-
American antisemitismFeature The world’s oldest hatred is on the rise in U.S. Why?
