Rachel Reeves: did she write her own book?

"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.

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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".