Wisecracking Angela Rayner delivers a masterclass in political satire

All in all, it was a pretty good day for Angela Rayner. She was note perfect replying to Michael Gove in the Commons, and breezed off in a Carrie Johnson-style dress to a press gallery lunch, where she told some quite good jokes (and some stinkers), and won some new admirers.

Along the way, she neatly dropped a little news bomblet about wanting Diane Abbott to get back the Labour whip, an almost-loyal intervention that upped the pressure on Keir Starmer a teeny bit without actually causing ructions.

And when the first question came about whether she dodged a grand’s worth of capital gains tax on a house sale a few years back came up, she dead-batted it like a pro. Nothing to see here, nothing to pay.

But then a second question came, about where exactly was she had been living if not with her husband and children… and suddenly Rayner began gushing emotion like an oil well in the Texan desert struck by a lucky prospector’s spade, spurting out revelations without taking a breath.

“You’ve got to understand, and this has been the difficulty, I think, getting this over: when I got my house, it was so important to me. Getting that house so I could provide for my son was huge. That was so important to me, I weren’t just giving it up.”

Angie as poster girl for Margaret Thatcher’s council house sales takes a bit of getting used to. But, as they say, any port in a storm.

There was more, much more. Her baby son was born at 23 weeks, and the medics at one stage told her “to switch his life support machine off”. She also had a teenage son and a brother who’d served in Iraq and lost his job and stayed in her house, and a husband, 17 years older, who, unlike her, had inherited a house from his parents, and in short there was no way she was going to give up her own property and move in with him. After blurting all this out, Rayner said her family deserved a bit of privacy. We all agreed.

Rayner is a tougher cookie than she looks. With her waterfall of auburn My Little Pony tresses, she gives off an insecure, slightly brittle vibe. But under the hair is a sharp brain and a rhino-thick hide.

You could go through her words and find things that don’t seem to add up. Was it a legal adviser, an estate agent or a tax adviser who assured her she didn’t need to pay CGT? It wasn’t clear.

But you could also shrug and ask, what the hell does it matter anyway? After all, the sum at issue – estimated at £1,000 to £1,500 – is actually less than the daily interest that the Tories right now may be earning on Frank Hester’s £10m donations (some £1,600 a day if they banked it right, and they’re supposed to know about money, aren’t they, even if they don’t have a clue what racism means or what a total scumbag looks like).

And, anyway, this whole intrigue comes out of the same scandal factory as the tale of David Cameron inserting his manhood into a dead pig’s jaws: a new book by Lord Ashcroft.

Rayner arrived at the press gallery lunch, traditionally a relaxed affair, armed with some mischievous jokes that went down well. Recalling chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s “five Es”, she mused: “I thought I’d only be offered ‘es’ over the dispatch box if I was shadowing Michael Gove.”

Dominic Raab was a “winker”, and Tory chair Richard Holden, currently in search of a safer seat than his Red Wall marginal, had gone “from eating chicken here with you to doing the chicken run up the M1”.

Asked about Abbott, she said that, personally, she would like to see the first black woman MP back in the Labour fold, but procedures had to be followed because they were part of what made Labour fit to govern.

Earlier, she had the job of responding to Michael Gove’s Commons statement on extremism. She asked pertinent questions and got the tone right, insisting that “the whole house can and should work together” on this. She firmly rebuked the minister for advance leaks, scolding him: “It’s not right that we have spent the last four days poring over the possible definition in the papers.”

Gove conceded in reply that a leak inquiry was necessary and was justly rewarded with a peal of mocking laughter when he pretended: “I deprecate that leak.” He welcomed her “challenge” and “constructive approach”.

George Galloway, who would probably be at the top of Gove’s little blacklist if he had not recently been elected as honorable member for Rochdale, questioned the justice of it all. “Try getting a bank account after you’ve been branded by Michael Gove as an extremist.”

Sir Desmond Swayne, who always seems to have wandered into Westminster from a Drone Club lunch, declared that Muslims should get used to the same level of “criticism, even blasphemy, as Christianity has become accustomed to” before asking: “I’m not being extremist, am I?”

No, just an idiot, would have been the correct answer but Gove instead assured him he was “many things” including “learned, wise, kind, a champion of the New Forest” but not an extremist.

Labour’s John Cryer pointed out that if ministers were indeed daft enough to be having official meetings with all these extremists “they shouldn’t have been ministers in the first place”.

Gove didn’t really have an answer for that.