The claws have been out for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner since she strode into Downing Street in a mint green trouser suit – a gobby working-class woman with ideas above her station… who just happens to embody everything the Labour Party stands for
The signs were there from the moment Angela Rayner arrived at Downing Street on July 5 last year, wearing a relaxed cut, spearmint trouser suit from the brand Me+Em.
As the sun rose on a new government, Rayner, a former care worker who left school pregnant at 16 and whose mother couldn’t read and write, would shortly be appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Cheered by working-class women across the country, her big moment was greeted with derision from others. Her suit was too bright, too baggy, too expensive for a working-class woman, and too ‘ghastly’ – she looked like ‘a clown’.
After years of the clown prince Boris – a Prime Minister frequently seen in dishevelled boxers and mouldy fleeces with rumpled boy-hair that looked like a bird’s nest – the critique was particularly pointed.
They should have said what they meant. It wasn’t the clothes – it was Rayner who didn’t fit. This gobby working class woman with ideas above her station should have known her place wasn’t striding along Downing Street like a catwalk.
The ducking stool was ready from day one.
But it was water off a duck house’s back to a girl who once feared being taken into care and was told “I’d never amount to anything” when she left school. And to the first woman MP in the 180-year history of her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency.
Rayner’s backstory embodies everything the Labour Party stands for. A young carer for a bipolar mother with a father often out of work, she credits her success to the 1997 Labour government’s Sure Start.
Now, a new generation of workers will be able to thank her for Labour’s flagship workers’ rights legislation. No wonder they were gunning for Rayner before the sick from Partygate had dried on the walls.
For going to Glyndebourne (above her station, again). For questions over whether she had paid the right amount of tax following the sale of her council house in Stockport a decade ago – which resulted in no police action.
For dancing to rave music in Ibiza. And for crossing and uncrossing her legs in public – an act said to be an attempt to distract political opponents not already looking at ‘tractor porn’.
Rayner rightly said the disgraceful episode “wasn’t just about me as a woman, it was also steeped in classism and about where I come from, where I grew up”.
Now it’s ‘Three Pads Rayner’. They have to say ‘three pads’ because she doesn’t own three homes. One comes with her job, the other is owned by other family members, the third is her new flat in Hove.
Rayner has now conceded she did not pay the right stamp duty on the purchase of the Hove flat – having initially been advised, she says by three different advisors, that the property counted as her primary home. She has referred herself to the ethics committee over reports she owes £40,000 in stamp duty.
If Sir Laurie Magnus rules against her, her position will be untenable. Yet her explanation for doing so – that she gave up her stake in the house to guarantee a roof over her disabled child’s head – will resonate with anyone who has a disabled, learning disabled or neurodiverse child.
As she says: “Family life is rarely straightforward, particularly when dealing with disability, divorce and the complexities of ensuring your children’s long-term security.”
Many more parents will understand Rayner’s agony at being forced to disclose personal, painful details of her disabled middle child’s birth and life – in order to explain her home-financing decisions.
In one interview, she was clearly fighting back tears as she said, “before anything else I’m a mum… and it’s his story and not mine to tell”.
Many parents of disabled children worry about the roof over their child’s head as they move into adulthood, as was generously acknowledged yesterday by the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who also has a disabled child.
“I understand it is normally the role of opposition leaders to jump up and down and call for resignations – as we’ve seen plenty of from the Conservatives already,” he said.
“Obviously if the ethics advisor says Angela Rayner has broken the rules, her position may well become untenable. But as a parent of a disabled child, I know the thing my wife and I worry most about is our son’s care after we have gone, so I can completely understand and trust that the Deputy Prime Minister was thinking about the same thing here.
“Perhaps now is a good time to talk about how we look after disabled people and how we can build a more caring country.”
Other parents of disabled children have rushed to the defence of the Deputy Prime Minister this week. No-one remembers owners of duck islands coming out for the late Peter Viggers, or black armbands at Newbury for Nadhim Zahawi’s horse heating, or opticians for Cummings.
Because, actually, context does matter. This is not a tale of taxpayers’ money cleaning the family moat, fake eye tests, or corrupt VIP lanes that caused deaths.
It may even just be a story of trying to do your best for your kids with what may turn out to have been bad advice.
The Right have long been gunning for Rayner because they have always understood much better than the Left that she is the most powerful weapon the current Labour Party has. Something her boss Keir Starmer has also come to understand.
This is not just based on great shoes and bling sunglasses. As Commons Leader Lucy Powell said yesterday, the Tories are having a go at Rayner “because she is so bloody good at her job”.
The Deputy PM has her own brand of pragmatic socialism that chimes with people because it is rooted in her own life experiences. “When I was a free school meals kid, principles would not have fed me,” she once said. “It was the free school meals programme that Labour brought in.”
When Rayner floats around the sea in an inflatable kayak puffing on a giant vape with a beaker of rosé, it’s the equivalent of Farage slurping a pint of Remainer Tears in a British boozer: catnip to voters.
Because women across the UK know that if something was kicking off, we’d ask for Angela.
The former carer has the kind of cut-through other more robotic frontbenchers on all sides of the House can only dream of. But a real person who didn’t spend their naughtiest years dodging library fines and only doing E with their PP at Oxbridge brings with them a complicated hinterland of life with plenty of threads for critics to pull apart.
We say we want our politicians to look and sound and think – and be – like us. We want authenticity, we say. But the reality is that ‘real’ lives start to look messy when they are stretched out on the big stage.
If Labour loses Rayner, it will lose its greatest remaining bridge with its working class voters and its loudest claim to be the People’s Party. Nigel Farage is already at the bar like a man glued to the horseracing – waiting for his winnings to come in.
But in or out of the Cabinet, the fact remains Rayner remains Keir Starmer’s most likely successor. And her critics can put that in their vape and smoke it.