Seeing those photographs of Angela Rayner on Hove beach in broad daylight drinking a vast glass of rosé (‘day wine’ as my lot call it) I felt a rare flash of FOMO. I met a lot of politicians when I worked as a political columnist for the Mail on Sunday in my twenties, and I’ve rarely craved their company since. But seeing Rayner on my doorstep (doing one of the things I used to most love doing before I became an invalid – boozing on Hove beach in broad daylight) I felt a pang of loss.
But then, we’d have only been half a glass down before we’d have started screeching at each other like a pair of soused-up fishwives. For though I love the fact that a genuinely working-class person stands a chance of being leader of the Labour party for the first time this century (let alone the first ever woman –naughty oversight!) I can’t stand Rayner’s politics. Still, I have an awful feeling that if ever I got the chance to vote for her as PM, I would, against my better judgement. The heart wants what it wants, as Woody Allen once said.
I have an awful feeling that if ever I got the chance to vote for her as PM, I would, against my better judgement.
Every party needs a frontbench politician who hasn’t been ‘doctored’, as we say of dogs who’ve come back from the vet a couple of nuts lighter, to do the dirty work of the PM and/or make them look like they’re not so insecure that they need to be surrounded by geldings. Norman Tebbit (Michael Foot called him a ‘semi house-trained pole cat’, otherwise known as ‘the Chingford Skinhead’) did this for Mrs Thatcher while John Prescott was Gordon Brown’s bit of rough, never slow to throw a slur or a punch. Angela Rayner fulfils this function for the eerily robotic Keir ‘Uncanny Valley’ Starmer.
He knows better than to attempt to house-train this flame-haired flame-thrower. Back in 2021 before he got to power, after removing her as Labour party chair on 8 May, her popularity in the party soon saw her reappointed as shadow first secretary of state, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for future of work. Boris Johnson had fun in the Commons pretending to be David Attenborough: ‘In any pride of lions, it is the male who tends to occupy the position of nominal authority, but the most dangerous beast, the prize hunter of the pack is in fact the lioness.’ Adding: ‘I’m sure Sir Keir bears this in mind as he contemplates his friend – the deputy leader, the shadow first secretary of state, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work – though the more titles he feeds her, the hungrier I fear she is likely to become.’
Nobody could blame Rayner for being hungry; a carer for her sick mother at the age of ten, a mother herself at 16, a grandmother at 37. But she can be grasping, too, which is altogether different. This can range from silly behaviour, as in 2015 when she wrote an angry letter to a Brighton shoe shop on parliamentary notepaper, complaining bitterly about them selling out of R2-D2 high heels after they failed to reserve a pair for her, to the serious one which saw her accused – and cleared – of tax evasion when she sold her former home, a council house, for a tidy profit.
Her silliness verging into the shady is present in her politics, too. In common with many of her Labour sisters, she is a Transmaid. During the leadership contest, she signed a pledge to expel Labour members who were judged to hold ‘transphobic’ views, that is, who believe in biological sex and women’s single-sex spaces. It’s telling that while Rayner was quite happy – verging on trigger-happy – to go rogue on crime and punishment (‘On law and order I am quite hardline… shoot your terrorists and ask questions second… if you are being terrorised by the local thug, I want a copper to come and sort them out’), on trans-issues she invariably reverts to being a mealy-mouthed Miss Muffet, telling Sky News: ‘When we debase it to whether or not… what genitalia you’ve got, I think all that does is damage people and it doesn’t help us go forward on some of the real issues that people are facing.’ The police are going to have a hard time catching all these violent criminals while they’re wasting their time and our money sending uniformed coppers round to people’s houses warning them not to ‘misgender’ men in make-up on the internet. Asked what a woman is, Rayner once said: ‘I don’t think it’s for politicians to decide – people need to feel safe and that includes women who are transitioning.’
From the silly, to the shady, to the outright sinister. At a time when Labour is gagging like a goggle-eyed groupie for the Muslim vote, there are a couple images from the last election campaign of what we have been taught to call strong Labour women which stick in the mind – and the craw. Jess Phillips, openly barracked about Palestine during her ‘victory’ speech mentioning all the abuse she had suffered in the course of the election (‘It was pretty horrendous’) but still subsequently showing fealty to this crucial (in her constituency) vote by being so dismissive of a national inquiry into Muslim rape gangs. And then there was Rayner, probably the most immodest (and I use that word as praise) woman in the Commons, wearing an ankle-length dress that made Laura Ashley look like Ann Summers, in a roomful of Muslim men apologising for Labour’s position on a ceasefire in Gaza and basically begging for their votes. Her proposal to bring in a new and official definition of Islamophobia to be applied across the public sector must have occurred to her as a tidy little vote-winner – until, last month, to quote a report in the Telegraph:
‘Angela Rayner’s proposal for an official definition of Islamophobia would hand Reform a 100-seat majority at the expense of Labour, a poll has found. Bringing in the definition would cause a loss of one million votes to Labour, and a fall in its seats in the Commons from 155 to 103. The poll was carried out by J L Partners, whose founder, James Johnson, said: “This polling shows that if Labour introduces a new definition of Islamophobia, it would be like setting off a tinderbox under what remains of their working-class vote. With Reform nipping at Labour’s heels in hundreds of seats, that is not something they can afford.”’
That’s even without taking into consideration last week’s report in the Times about the voting intentions of those nutters who don’t believe that Labour will go far enough in twinning Westminster with Palestine:
‘One in four Labour members could back Jeremy Corbyn’s party at the next general election. Twenty-eight per cent of those surveyed said they were considering supporting the former Labour leader’s new left-wing, pro-Gaza movement, which is set to be launched formally in the autumn. Corbyn announced the venture along with fellow MP Zarah Sultana in July, aiming to win over disaffected Labour voters. The pair will be heartened by polling from Survation, which shows the majority of Labour members want Sir Keir Starmer’s party to change direction.’
Poor old Ange – like a gobby Pushmi-Pullyu, stuck between the demands of the native working-class she came from and the coalition of the aggrieved she now tries to appeal to. As the silenced, scolded people of England finally make themselves heard, with their flags and their protests, Rayner is going to have to think long and hard about what side she will take. As one of the few working-class people prominent in British politics (she has asked House of Commons transcribers not to correct her speech, leaving in her occasionally incorrect grammar ‘because it’s who I am’) the choice should be obvious. If only she’d have been Jeremy Corbyn instead of Jeremy Corbyn. But the damage is done now and the Labour party is irreparably damaged by forces within (ethnic pandering) and without (Reform).
It turns out that Ange wasn’t just in my hood taking a dip; she’s apparently bought a flat just around the corner from me, costing a reported £800,000 – even more expensive than mine! BN3, where we’ll be neighbours, is one of the most valuable and sought after postcodes outside of London. Young people who grew up here find it well nigh impossible to stay here, due to pesky incomers like myself and Red Ange, who already has a pleasant house in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, a grace-and-favour London apartment in the sumptuous Admiralty House and now what the Mail describes as ‘a superb seafront flat in fashionable Hove.’ Let’s hope she won’t be popping round for a cup of sugar anytime soon – because, with my fatal weakness for her, despite her lousy politics, I’m very afraid I might invite her in for a whopping glass of day-wine.
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