Angela Rayner declined an invitation to a hen do last weekend where the entertainment included axe-throwing. ‘She was worried about photos,’ says one attendee. The Deputy Prime Minister had to see a family member instead, but a close ally admits: ‘She is more careful about attracting that sort of publicity than she used to be.’
Robbed as we are of the sight of Rayner waving an axe around when the Prime Minister is suffering his worst weeks in Downing Street, it is tempting to ask, as Metternich didn’t quite say of Talleyrand: ‘What did she mean by that?’ It’s a far cry from the days when she screamed that the Tories were ‘scum’ at a conference party or was filmed raving in Ibiza.
For much of Labour’s first year in power, Rayner kept her head down and avoided creating a rival power centre. Those in and around Downing Street, however, have realised that the more under the radar Rayner flies, the more seriously they should take her.
‘Her commitment to her ambition was demonstrated to the greatest degree possible by the extent to which she did not rock the boat over welfare,’ observes a senior Labour figure close to No. 10. In the Commons, Rayner loyally parroted Keir Starmer’s lines about changes to personal independence payments. ‘No backbencher believed that she believed it, therefore she was able to just take the loyalty points,’ the source adds.
And yet it was Rayner to whom Starmer was forced to turn when the rebellion spiralled out of control. It was Angela, along with chief whip Alan Campbell – dubbed the ‘AA-Team’ – who sought to broker a deal with the rebels and who privately made it clear that the government might lose, prompting Downing Street to gut the bill. With the parliamentary Labour party restive, it was Rayner who was dispatched on Monday to address the troops.
Many Labour MPs are concluding that if Rayner was once seen as the ‘Howling Mad Murdock’ of the AA-Team, gobby and with questionable judgment, she has now emerged as the party’s John ‘Hannibal’ Smith, an adept political operator who leaves others wondering what the plan is and when it will come together.
Allies say it was her intention, initially, to keep a low profile, keen as she was to answer critics who questioned whether she was clever enough to handle a top cabinet post. ‘The goal was to show she could get on with the job and get things done,’ one says. So while most of the Starmer administration spent its first three months flailing around in a word soup of missions and milestones, Rayner overhauled the National Planning Policy Framework, to make building easier. Planning applications rose 6 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2025.
Even fans of Streeting acknowledge she would be hard to stop if the PM fell under the proverbial bus
Her Planning and Infrastructure Bill is in committee in the Lords next week. That, plus her Renters’ Rights Bill and her Employment Rights Bill, are expected to get royal assent in the autumn. Wildly unpopular as the latter is with business, each of these has been pushed through with less strife than expected.
Part of her success, Rayner believes, is her ability to connect with people, having been ‘a teenage mum’. She told Grazia this week: ‘Growing up on an estate, I knew when to be quiet, when to speak and how to bring people round. Anyone who grew up from the same background as I have, you’ve got higher diplomatic skills than someone highly privileged, because you’ve never had the power in your hands; you’ve always had to negotiate and struggle.’
Even her enemies acknowledge her people skills. Those drinking on the Commons terrace in early March were stunned to see Rayner on a teasing FaceTime call with Nigel Farage, joshing over which party would win the Runcorn by-election. Reform eventually did so by six votes on 2 May, when Labour haemorrhaged 187 council seats. Plenty of MPs think those are the kind of seats that a more rumbustious leader than Starmer might save from Reform.
Farage gets her appeal: ‘At least she’s real,’ he says. ‘None of the rest of them are. She is who she is.’ It may not be a coincidence that Rayner’s favourite karaoke song is ‘You to Me Are Everything’ by 1970s soul outfit the Real Thing.
Rayner is more than a boilerplate leftie. Her political friends include Business Secretary and constituency neighbour Jonathan Reynolds (who watched the election results at her house last year) and Environment Secretary Steve Reed, neither of whom is an ideological soulmate. When Rayner took part in her first Prime Minister’s Questions it was Tony Blair she turned to for advice and Wes Streeting who helped with snappy lines. Her confidence at the despatch box, she tells friends, comes from an almost ‘out of body experience’ where she ‘embodies the people I’ve been sent here to represent’.
The New Labour politician with whom she is most often compared is John Prescott, the bruiser trade unionist who was Blair’s deputy. Rayner once referred to herself as ‘John Prescott in a skirt’. She is now aping his powerbase with a dedicated Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, staffed by 30 officials, a new logo and a Cabinet Office base. The goal of her cross-government work is to ‘create sustainable communities’ – a phrase lifted from Prezza’s mission statement.
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Rayner as a Prescott tribute act. Her admirers say that she’s cleverer than he was and her one-liners tend to be intentional. In addition to bashing Tory wannabes at Prime Minister’s Questions, Rayner will deputise for Starmer at this week’s Ukraine recovery conference. Prezza was seldom entrusted with foreign affairs.
Her real role model may instead be Gordon Brown, with whom Rayner was photographed as a Unison rep in 2007. Rayner has eclipsed Rachel Reeves as the most powerful woman in the government and, as the memo she sent to the Chancellor (suggesting eight tax rises on pensions, dividends and wealth) shows, she is also beginning to throw her weight around.
Most importantly, Rayner is Starmer’s heir apparent. Even fans of Streeting, considered her main rival, acknowledge that she would be hard to stop if the PM fell, or was pushed, under the proverbial bus. In Nick Parrott, her chief of staff, she has a skilled operator who can keep her on her perch. It is a measure of Rayner’s new strength that she has no need of an axe.
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