Is Angela Rayner going to lose Keir Starmer the next election?

Building more houses is everyone’s favourite policy – until it comes to the question of where to build them.

Labour is about to discover the difference between promising something that sounds good in opposition and trying to deliver it in government – and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is going to be the one doing the finding out.

Most people think that building 1.5m new houses in the next five years (now four and a half already) is a good idea. Indeed, one of the criticisms most often heard is that it is not ambitious enough.

No one noticed at the time, because by the end the Conservatives were throwing out election promises with Corbynite enthusiasm, but the Tories actually outbid Labour at the election by pledging to build 1.6m houses.

Yet it falls to Labour to try to deliver, and Rayner has set about it with a bit of vim and gusto.

Within days of the election, she confirmed that she would be setting compulsory targets for the numbers of homes that should be built in every local authority area, and published a first draft of those targets. Today, she has issued a definitive version of the targets, greeted by a declaration of war from The Telegraph: “Labour bid to ‘bulldoze’ the Home Counties.”

Once upon a time, Labour could afford to be relaxed about a revolt of the Tory shires, but not any more. Large parts of the shires are represented by Labour MPs now. I have watched or read every maiden speech by the 332 new MPs, most of them Labour, and many of them elected by places that have been Tory since Anglo-Saxon times.

Dan Tomlinson, for example, is the Labour MP for Chipping Barnet, a constituency at the northern edge of Greater London, surrounded on three sides by countryside. He described it as “a suburb of London”, and said in his first speech: “It is my contention that when a political party understands the suburbs, it is able then, and only then, to speak on behalf of, and govern for, the country as a whole.”

These are places where the voters regard Rayner’s house-building targets as a threat to their quality of life. It does not matter whether or not they are right to do so, it is what they think and it is the kind of issue that moves votes.

Most Labour MPs are loyal in public, and simply repeat the 1.5 million figure – it was one of the mantras of their maiden speeches, along with “GB Energy” and a publicly owned railway. But in private, many of them sound like Liberal Democrats and Tories, claiming not to be opposed to new housing – it is just that they are worried about “inappropriate” development, and about whether the infrastructure and public services are in place.

Another staple of Labour maiden speeches was Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill. The same pattern is repeated: everyone agrees with workers’ rights in the abstract, and in particular it sounds kind and decent to be opposed to “unfair” dismissal in the first two years in a job. But in practice, being able to hire people easily and drop them is better for everyone. Workers’ rights create work mainly for lawyers and impose costs on employers, who are already hit by the rise in national insurance in Rachel Reeves’s Budget.

If, in a couple of years’ time, businesses have recovered from Reeves’s tax hike only to find themselves hit by extra costs from Rayner’s legislation, that is going to put a further dampener on Labour’s ambitions for economic growth.

By then, the next election will seem uncomfortably close, and many Labour MPs with small majorities will have few incentives to keep quiet about policies that will lose them votes in their constituencies.

Rayner is enough of a natural politician to sense the danger and adjust her policies accordingly. If she does not, then as campaigns spring up to protest against housing targets imposed by central government on local people against their wishes, Labour MPs will join the demands on Keir Starmer to rein in his troublesome deputy prime minister.