The rise and rise of Angela Rayner

When Angela Rayner stood in for the self-isolating Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions last week, her staff were braced for a backlash that never happened. In her five years as one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most visible shadow ministers, and in her more recent six months as the Labour Party’s deputy leader, whenever Rayner has appeared on television, it has been met with a depressingly inevitable reaction on social media.

“The Vicky Pollard stuff” is how one member of her team jovially describes it, though it is not a jovial matter. It is foul and abusive, and not worth repeating in detail, other than to say that it is hardly shocking that there should be a large corner of the internet that seems unable to cope with the idea that a working-class woman who left school at 16 with no qualifications while pregnant might be doing rather more with her life than they are.

But it is surprising that, on Wednesday lunchtime, they were conspicuously quiet. Rayner, by common consent, gave an outstanding performance. Silencing Boris Johnson on these occasions has, in the past few months, come to look rather easy. Silencing the worst of social media is a challenge of a different order of magnitude.

Those of us whose job it is to provide analysis of what is, in the end, no more than one person asking six questions of another, had all said in advance that Boris Johnson had, to an extent, been pre-silenced. The Four Yorkshiremen school of political analysis is a depressingly common one these days, and by that particular metric, Rayner is almost impossible for Johnson to attack. She is as working class as they come. At the age at which he was smashing up the backroom of pubs in a four-grand morning suit, she was caring for her own child, and her mother, and working evening shifts in a care home.

But such things should not put politicians beyond reproach. There is a ball to be played as well as a man. What silenced the usual dreadful chorus of critics was her performance. Did the prime minister know how much a care home worker earns? No he didn’t.  

“The next time a man with Covid symptoms drives from London to Durham it will probably be for the nearest Covid test,” she said. What have come to be known as “zingers” really shouldn’t matter very much. They certainly change very little. But it is a self-evident fact that the country has a stand-up comedian for a prime minister, and he hasn’t delivered a gag of that quality in quite some time.

It would be over the top to say that this was the moment that Rayner escaped her back story, not least as she doesn’t especially want to. It is hard to see there being any destination she might reach in politics that will fully overshadow quite where her journey began. It is not merely that the fact she became a grandmother at 37 will always fascinate, that the details of her young life looking after a mother with profound mental health problems are so shocking to those of us who have never lived anything like it.

The way she talks means she is regularly described as “thick” – she is anything but. That she worked in care homes, became involved in trade union politics and is now deputy leader of the Labour Party has, in Westminster, occasionally prompted Conservatives to tell her she is really one of them. She has worked her way up with no one’s help, she has bettered herself, and that means they and her are both in politics for the same reason.

Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t see it that way. In her view, it is precisely because the state was there for her when she needed it, in the late Nineties to be exact, that she is now in a position to put something back. And not everyone has been so lucky.

“I would have been seen as a scrounger, a scally unlikely to make anything of my life,” she told The Spectator in an interview in 2018. “But without those interventions I wouldn’t have been able to have my son, who is having a great life and has done really well for himself. And I wouldn’t now be a taxpayer who pays their way in life, no longer on any benefits. I wouldn’t be supporting my other two wonderful children. Sometimes you have to invest in people to get the best out of them. To me, that is socialism. That is why I’m a Labour member rather than a Conservative.’

In a world in which the word “socialism” is considered to have lost the argument, that is as potent a mission statement for the Labour Party as you are ever likely to hear. It has also helped her emerge relatively unscathed from her party’s ongoing civil war in a way that few have managed.

That Starmer spent five years serving in a Corbyn shadow cabinet which the likes of Chuka Umunna, Stephen Kinnock, Luciana Berger and others felt they could not, and remains almost entirely unblemished by the experience, is the mark of a deft politician.

If Rayner has done the same it is because she is unashamedly her own person. She has never made any secret of the fact that she appreciated Corbyn’s loyalty to her, and she returned it in kind. He was supportive of her, particularly with regard to the personal abuse she received. Whenever she spoke in the Commons chamber, he was there.

But she never got involved, as others did, in the vicious criticisms of Labour’s recent record in government. But not through any great political strategy, or triangulation, but because she knows she might have been lost without it.

In four years as shadow education secretary, she deliberately tried to switch the focus of party policy from what it could offer 18-year-olds wanting to go to university to what it might do for working parents unable to meet the exorbitant costs of pre-school care.

The deputy leadership is a rather more difficult role to define, but she is already making progress. People close to her are keen to stress that she and Starmer really do view the leadership as a joint project. They speak every day. Communication to members and to MPs almost always comes from both of them.

Having won their respective leadership elections in April, the pair’s entire period in charge has been during the coronavirus crisis. In the early days, Labour sought consensus and to a certain extent still does. But there is no doubting there has been a change in approach. That they read the national mood as one of growing dissatisfaction with the performance of the government, and that it is their duty to point that out.

There is also no doubting that this will play to Rayner’s strengths. But criticising the government for its incompetence is one thing. It will also be down to her, perhaps more than anyone else, to reconnect the party with its natural base.

It is no secret that the Labour Party knows that normal people, from normal backgrounds, who live in normal places, have stopped seeing Labour as being on their side. Seeing Angela Rayner on the news, asking the prime minister how much a care worker earns and failing to get an answer will be an important part of that rebuilding process, and she knows it.  

You do not have to look hard to find politicians and pundits gravely pointing out that the difficulty of that particular task. But not many of them have faced the kind of challenges Rayner has and come out very much on top and against all odds. It would not merely be typically patronising, but very brave indeed, to bet against her.