Amid a Cabinet of dull mumblers, Angela Rayner was the gallivanting, eye-flashing exception. Sir Keir Starmer praised her ‘working-class background’ but actually that wasn’t so rare, even in the modern Labour party.
What was unusual about Mrs Rayner, and what made her so essential to the joyless Starmerites, was her unbridled greed for life. Whereas Sir Keir and his circle spoke in atonal cliches, Mrs Rayner bellowed the rhythms of ordinary, aspirational Britain. Apart from the health secretary, Wes Streeting, she was the only person around Sir Keir’s cabinet table who sounded non-political. In a country heartily sick of its political class, that was a godsend.
Coarse? Mrs Rayner was certainly that. At a drunken Labour conference reception in 2021 she denounced Conservatives as ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile, banana republic, nasty, Etonian, piece of scum’. It was an idiotic and offensive thing to say. However, plenty of Labour activists agreed with her and even though she later issued a reluctant apology for her outburst, it strengthened her political base.
Here was the authentic voice of the snarling Left and Sir Keir could not ignore it. Yet for all her political shrewdness, Mrs Rayner was secretly, we now know, a woman of gluttonous appetites.
In public she assumed quasi-Marxist positions. In private she dabbled in tax avoidance and property speculation, knocked back buckets of rose wine and luxuriated in the finer things of life. She made a handy profit on the sale of her former council house (there were questions about her tax bill then, too). She borrowed £5,600 for a ‘boob job’ on her 30th birthday. She trousered an £836 freebie to a disco rave in Ibiza, where she danced like a banshee.
And she allowed the Blairite plutocrat Lord Alli to give her thousands of pounds worth of free clothes. In the words of the old satirical song, sung to the tune of the Red Flag, ‘the working class can kiss my a***, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’.
It seemed a very different Angela Rayner who made her maiden speech in June 2015, just after Labour had been defeated by David Cameron’s Conservatives.
As the new MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, a solidly Labour Manchester constituency, she declared herself a socialist and claimed to be the first home carer to have made it to the Commons. ‘I always tell it how it is in my own little Northern way,’ averred the woman who a decade later would become caught in such a tangled saga about trust funds, mortgages, unpaid taxes and swanky Southern lawyers. She also told the Commons that she had become pregnant at the age of 16 and that one of her four sons was born after just 23 weeks’ gestation. ‘I know what it is to struggle to make ends meet,’ she said. She has never been slow to pull out the onion.
In a technocratic Labour party that had drifted far from the factory floor, Mrs Rayner was seized on by the rolling-news channels as an interviewee. She proved an adroit media performer, delivering crisp messages in her unaffected Stockport accent. After Jeremy Corbyn upset the odds by becoming Labour leader in September 2015, Mrs Rayner quickly prospered. She was promoted to the opposition front bench as an education spokesman after just two years as an MP.
As the Mail’s parliamentary sketch writer I went along to one of her early press conferences. She was untidier in those days but there was an undeniable political talent. She had the brashness, the ego, the sweeping certitude that successful politicians often need. She seemed crazily Left-wing, yes, spouting the usual class-war claptrap you expect from trade union sweats – before entering parliament she had been an area convenor for Unison – but there was an undeniable ability to communicate a salty message. In 2020, after Mr Corbyn’s resignation, she was elected to succeed Tom Watson as the party’s deputy leader. Supported by the Corbynite Momentum movement, she romped home.
The Labour deputy leadership is a semi-autonomous figure with his or her own mandate from the Labour movement. As leader, the constipated Starmer was patently not a natural bedfellow of his garish deputy.
To put it bluntly, she exuded a raw earthiness whereas he was about as sexy as a pair of chafing lederhosen. Early in their uneasy partnership they posed in his office ‘taking the knee’ after the Black Lives Matter protests. What a wooden duo they looked. As Sir Keir struggled in those early days, and as his strategists set about barring hard-Left activists from winning selection as parliamentary candidates, Mrs Rayner was said to be on manoeuvres. Relations between the two reached a low point before the 2021 party conference at which Rayner supporters stood outside the gathering with banners saying ‘Starmer Out, Socialism In’. It seemed only a matter of time before he would quit and ‘Red Queen’ Angela would seize the crown.
Labour’s fortunes turned thanks to the economic damage caused by lockdown (which Sir Keir had enthusiastically supported) and the Conservatives in-fighting, first as they toppled Boris Johnson, then with Liz Truss’s calamitous time as PM.
Sir Keir and Mrs Rayner swallowed their differences. She tolerated his deceptive flirtations with big business while he allowed her to make promises to her trade union friends. These would result in the pro-union employment rights bill which is now going through parliament. Employers hate the bill, which will extend working from home and make it harder for companies to sack bad employees. The unions, needless to say, love it. Mrs Rayner, as far as they are concerned, has delivered the goods.
That is why, until her stamp-duty scandal, she looked well placed to succeed Sir Keir. There was a sense of a woman biding her time. Her on-off boyfriend Sam Tarry, a Left-wing Labour MP, lost his parliamentary perch after plotting by the Starmerites. Mrs Rayner, who had divorced union official Mark Rayner in 2020, buttoned her lip. Did she buy the ill-fated flat in Hove because it would allow her to spend more time with Mr Tarry? Was she trying to impress her barrel-chested beau? Had she become party leader, would swaggering Sam have been found a safe seat? Any such mirages have now vanished under reality’s hot blaze.
The inconvenient truth is that, apart from the union legislation, she was not achieving much in government. Her much-trumpeted plans to build 1.3 million new homes looks wildly unrealistic. Her parliamentary performances, while noisy, lacked dialectic muscle, which is another way of saying that she came across as thick. It was a heck of a front but it was just that, really: front, with little behind and even less between the ears. But her chutzpah was not in doubt and that can take you quite a long way at Westminster. She defied Downing Street and stood up for Diane Abbott. Some said she was not entirely thrilled about the Treasury’s benefits cuts. She was keeping the Left’s embers glowing.
She was certainly more open about her personal ambition than she was about her tax affairs. She lost weight (always a sign of a politician on manoeuvres) and her sartorial sense improved, thanks in part to Lord Alli’s largesse. She flaunted her charisma, sashayed about the palace of Westminster like a catwalk model, and, on the eve of her tearful tax confession, pitched up in Downing Street wearing a pair of novelty sunshades. The unsubtle message? ‘I’m brash, I’m bad – and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
But then the truth came out and now she has gone, and the Starmer Government will be quieter, and more boring, and Labour’s Left will start to itch.
