As Keir Starmer’s re-run of the great Change UK centrist dad experiment sinks deeper into political quicksand, the importance of a party leader being able to project a compelling personality becomes ever more obvious.
Even the pinko pundit class that was overjoyed by his election as Labour leader is now close to giving up on Starmer, whose lack of ringcraft reminds us that there is something to be said for career politicians after all.
Ambitious shadow ministers with antennae more finely tuned in to the public mood than his are said already to be preparing prospective leadership campaign teams in anticipation of the voters of Batley and Spen delivering a devastating thumbs down to Starmer next week.
Hitherto most chatter about Labour’s future has centred on Andy Burnham as the figure who could revive its long-term fortunes. But Starmer’s demise is approaching far too quickly for that and his successor will surely be chosen from among the ranks of current Labour MPs.
My twenty quid will be going on deputy leader Angela Rayner, who at the time of writing can still be backed at 7-1. That the very mention of the abrasive Rayner, who provoked outrage by appearing to call a Tory MP ‘scum’ in the Commons chamber last year, causes shuddering in polite company is far from disabling for her.
Because Labour is in dire need of a polarising figure who can at least give it a basic identity and a sense of mission rather than the bland non-presence with which it is currently saddled. And the persona of bovver boot-wearing Aggro Angie could be just the ticket.
Rayner possesses a killer political instinct
Whatever you think of her, the woman knows how to identify a political bruise and then keep punching it. A look at her social media output also reveals her innate talent for expressing comprehensible opinions in direct language, a trait she shares with the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
Far more than Starmer’s, her politics is also rooted in workplace struggle, with basic priorities of winning better pay and conditions for shop floor staff cropping up again and again as befits her own life story as an early school-leaver and former care sector worker.
Her pinned tweet, linking to an interview with the Mirror she gave immediately after Labour’s disastrous election performance in May, says:
People don’t care about my job, they care about their jobs. Pay rises, rights at work, ending outsourcing so our public services are run for the public interest and not for profit, bringing back industry and delivering green jobs. That’s my mission.
Most of this stuff is what Labour was actually set up to fight for more than a century ago, but it has hitherto not featured much in Starmer’s output. Where his utterances are nuanced and measured, hers are unsubtle and rooted in enduring national stereotypes.
‘I don’t remember any Tory MPs being bothered about the prospects of working class kids – of all races and ethnicities – when they were lining up to vote against feeding hungry working class kids a few months ago,’ was her take on the current row over Conservatives raising the plight of deprived white children in the educational system.
Almost every position she takes on every issue that arises is based on the idea of the Conservatives only being interested at heart in advancing the interests of the privileged and well-connected. Her take on the home counties uprising against Tory planning reform being a case in point:
We need to build the council houses and genuinely affordable homes that people need, not more luxury flats to sit empty so wealthy investors can get richer. That means community oversight of planning not the Tories doing their developer donors’ bidding.
Or take this on social care reform:
When Boris Johnson stood on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street on his first day in office two years ago and said that he had prepared a plan to fix the crisis in social care, that was a lie.’
That added to an earlier tweet claiming:
Must have lost it down the back of his new sofa.
This ‘Tory scum’ narrative is hardly likely to broaden Labour support sufficiently to enable it to win a general election, but it will resonate among a good third of the public, including in Red Wall seats if and when Rishi Sunak starts reining-in public spending. In other words, it could put the Labour core vote back together rather as Michael Howard reassembled the Tory core vote after the dog days of Iain Duncan Smith.
Rayner also possesses a killer political instinct – one that enabled her to face down Starmer when he attempted to make her the scapegoat for his own lousy spring elections campaign. There has been no stopping her since then. Last week she raised eyebrows by posing for a photograph with Jeremy Corbyn at a campaign event in support of Barry Gardiner’s private member’s bill seeking to outlaw the practice of venture capitalists firing staff at businesses they have acquired and then rehiring them on worse pay and conditions.
While her aides claimed that Corbyn – who is still without the party whip after Starmer suspended him over his response to a damning report on Labour anti-Semitism – had ‘photo-bombed’ her, the picture of them together certainly sent out an interesting signal to left-wing grassroots members who would very much like him back in the fold.
As Freddie Mercury once sang:
She’s a killer queen, gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam, guaranteed to blow your mind.
Get ready for the coronation.
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