Enemies denounce her as “disgraceful”, “grasping” and “a born liar”. Supporters say she is the “real deal” and can beat Nigel Farage. As Sir Keir Starmer vacillates over a new Middle Eastern war, Angela Rayner is rallying the troops to take over as PM.
She is in with every chance. The mood of the party feels a little like the one that permeated the Tory ranks before they took a punt on Boris Johnson. And to her delight, Rayner’s rivals are stalling. A sizeable number of Labour MPs calculate she is the only figure that can see off Reform. The Right should not be too quick to scoff. The teen mum who fought her way from poverty to Parliament could prove a formidable rival to Farage.
Enemies denounce her as “disgraceful”, “grasping” and “a born liar”. Supporters say she is the “real deal” and can beat Nigel Farage. As Sir Keir Starmer vacillates over a new Middle Eastern war, Angela Rayner is rallying the troops to take over as PM.
She is in with every chance. The mood of the party feels a little like the one that permeated the Tory ranks before they took a punt on Boris Johnson. And to her delight, Rayner’s rivals are stalling. A sizeable number of Labour MPs calculate she is the only figure that can see off Reform. The Right should not be too quick to scoff. The teen mum who fought her way from poverty to Parliament could prove a formidable rival to Farage.
On one level, the idea of Rayner as PM is preposterous. A coronation for the “Red Queen” who has been investigated for tax avoidance would reinforce the public impression of our rulers being above the rules. The ongoing HMRC probe into her tax affairs is a serious complication to her leadership ambitions.
Rayner doesn’t exactly exude statesmanly qualities. To many, she appears ideologically empty and, according to a former colleague, a serial bulls—er. The dyed-in-the-wool socialist act is quite absurd. Her aspirational aggression reeks of Thatcherism; in other circumstances, she’d have bloomed as a working-class Tory.
Rayner’s hypocrisy can be flagrant. Take her core crusade against “rogue” employers. By her own admission, it was a loosely regulated care agency that gave her the lifeline of shifts after she left school with no qualifications.
Yet for all this Rayner is special. Even those of us who see through her, can’t help but admire her. And so it goes that against the odds, Rayner’s stock is rising by the day. Her rivals to succeed Starmer are struggling to make headway. Shabana Mahmood’s fans concede that she has no profile, despite her attempts to crack down on immigration. Andy Burnham’s path remains blocked. And Ed Miliband’s opening gambit has bombed.
Miliband’s theory that Labour can retain power with a lower vote chunk by firing up its base amid a split on the Right is being ripped apart by colleagues. They point to the electorally inefficient distribution of progressive voters. The Iran energy crisis shows green Miliband up as less a man of the moment and more a firebrand for yesterday’s fads. Whether his latest bid to reinvent himself as the leader of the anti-war movement can revive his fortunes remains an open question.
Rayner appears poised to take advantage of this vacuum. She can already count on considerable union support. One Labour affiliated transport union, the TSSA, has already endorsed Rayner. While she fell out with Unite over the Birmingham bin strikes, the country’s biggest union lacks a better horse to back. It is particularly disappointed with Miliband’s failure to outline provisions to insulate oil workers from his net zero plans.
Crucially among Labour MPs a sense is growing that Rayner is the only figure that can put Reform back in its box. On the surface, this may seem risible. Her public approval rating has tanked. When quizzing voters about Rayner on my travels in the North, “chancer,”’ a “charlatan” and “grotesque” were the words that most often cropped up. But the British public have a habit of giving the benefit of the doubt to flawed politicians whom they can identify with.
The Reform leader’s power derives from status as the singular voice of the people against the establishment. Starmer has proved the perfect foil for Farage, who revels in depicting himself as the London lawyer’s perfect opposite. Yet Rayner would break his monopoly over the “real” politician moniker.
Rayner brings into focus the affectations of Farage’s brand. For all his pub landlord mannerisms, Farage is a London private-school educated son of a stockbroker. Rayner was raised on a Stockport council house by an illiterate bipolar mother. The Reform leader’s privileged background should not matter but Red Wall voters are wrestling with the niggling anxiety that Reform is a Trojan Horse for poshboy Toryism. Rayner is shrewd enough to prey on that fear for all it is worth.
And while Farage is in his element when skewering Starmer, my hunch is that Rayner just confounds him. When I probed the Reform leader on her, he seemed lost. At first he was a little flippant, chuckling “she’s got personality”, “is a bit of a laugh” and “can try on the immigration stuff if she wants”. He abruptly turned apocalyptic, warning she would “tax everything out of existence”.
Some who know Rayner well insist she will be a non-ideological leader. One close source told me that she will “rein in all of her radical instincts and play it safe because she will think: I bloody love this. I get to go to Chequers.”
But it is because Rayner is an opportunist that she could prove the country’s most radical PM in decades. While the Red Queen may not be a deep thinker, she has a keen nose for shifts in the political atmosphere. More than any other pretender, she has grasped Labour’s yearning for a way forward that doesn’t involve selling its soul over immigration or fading into a progressive fringe. Many around Labour and its think tanks believe only one mission can unify a country bogged down in culture wars and divided over immigration: the mobilisation of state power to redirect economic opportunities towards ordinary people in an increasingly volatile world. This agenda is one that Rayner fully embraces.
The aspiring leader is polishing her pitch to win back both Green and Reform voters with a Left populist agenda that is bold on everything from rent caps and social housing sprees to workers rights. This not only resonates with the party’s hard socialists. One long suffering Starmer ally delicately intimated to me it could be Labour’s best shot at neutralising Reform. Her plan resembles the strategies that centrist leaders across the West, from Canada to Australia, are crafting to defang Right-wing populism. Amid stagnation, conservatives should not overlook Leftist populism’s appeal. As an AI jobs wipeout threatens professionals, the coalition of voters that Labour could galvanise through a new-wave socialism is growing.
As Lord Ashcroft writes in his biography Red Queen? if there is one thing that drives Rayner it is the yearning to prove wrong the assumption that she is a “scumbag” who would “amount to nothing”. While Blair was propelled by a messianic self-confidence, and Boris Johnson spurred by a hunger to be loved, Rayner is consumed by the desire to establish her own worth. That makes her a dangerous opponent. The Right underestimates her at its peril.