When John Profumo had to resign due to scandalous behaviour, he famously went to clean lavatories. Angela Rayner, by contrast, has been up to goodness knows what. Perhaps she’s been clothes shopping, appearing as she did today in the house, for the first time in ages, wearing an identical suit to Rachel Reeves.
As the disgraced former deputy prime minister rose to speak, Labour MPs let out an almighty yell of approval. The last person to give Angela Rayner a cheer like that was probably her mortgage lender. A vast number of MPs had turned up to give their support – including what looked like half the cabinet’s big guns, if you can call them that. There was Reeves, in her solidarity power-suit, Bridget Philistine, even Rayner’s successor, the Sage of Tottenham, had arrived to give his blessing.
Rayner talked about how tough it was for her, how principled she was in giving the information to the independent investigator and how actually the whole thing was the fault of tax law anyway. She hoped, nobly, that her example might inspire others and prevent them from falling into the same trap – aka, not looking at the stamp duty advice on the gov.uk website which was presumably drawn up by her own department. Not mentioned was the severance payment which Ms Rayner pocketed; despite her campaign to prevent sacked ministers receiving severance pay. On the contrition scale, this placed her somewhere between Boris Johnson and Jack the Ripper. There are single-celled viruses which are closer to having a concept of ‘sorry’ than Ms Rayner.
It wasn’t only an Apologia Pro Casa Sua, she also had one eye on the smattering of insects around her. Like most simple organisms, Labour backbenchers are easily pleased. All Big Ange had to do was talk about her ‘socialist principles’ and she got murmurs of approval. Of course, Marx and Engels made owning a Sussex holiday home the eleventh point of the Communist Manifesto but it was tragically cut in a later edit.
Still, MPs gazed at her with genuine reverence; some looked tearful by the end. I suddenly felt like I wasn’t in parliament at all but in Argentina in 1952, shortly after the death of Eva Peron. ‘Don’t cry for me, PLPers’ hasn’t quite got the same ring to it.
Alongside claiming to be a socialist, she talked about how wonderful not only the Blair government was but also the Starmer government is now. This was such blatant triangulation that she was lucky Pythagoras didn’t come and start measuring bits of her. Not mentioned, alas, was Mrs Thatcher for allowing her to buy her discounted council house and sell it on for a profit.
She referred to how many friends she had across the Labour party, clearly a dig at Sir Keir, whose number of actual meaningful human relationships is currently being calculated by experts in the subinfinite at Nasa. Of course, much of this was essentially platitude. ‘The Trade Union Movement isn’t about Me, it’s about Us’, was a particularly meaningless highlight, following as it did a speech that had been entirely self-serving and entirely about her.
Yet it gave her colleagues exactly what they wanted, self-satisfied word mush that addressed none of the actual issues in the room. All of it could be summed up by four words: ‘Not sorry; back soon’. If Labour wishes to continue its lobotomised slide into oblivion, Big Ange stands more than willing to help it along: a lot of her colleagues may well be looking lavatory cleaning in the face much sooner than they think.
Comments