Who is Angela Rayner?

Bolshie. Gobby. Blunt. Feisty. Mouthy. Scumbag. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has been called a lot of things, not all of which are nice. She has even—and here perhaps a trigger warning is required—been called “ginger”. She can give as good as she gets: she once called some Tories “scum”; she recently described Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, as a “pint-sized loser”.

That Ms Rayner receives such attention is a victory. Most of the Labour shadow cabinet remain just that: shadowy. Ms Rayner, by contrast, stands out: literally (she is tall), visually (she has unarguably red hair) and verbally. Whereas Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, utters phrases like “economic growth is the absolute foundational stone for everything”, Ms Rayner tends to say things like “I had my boob job on my 30th birthday” because “my boobs just looked like two boiled eggs in socks”. She causes conniptions.

If what she says flusters some, what she has not yet said flusters others. Her political future is not assured. The question of how much capital-gains tax she should have paid on the sale of a council house in Stockport looks increasingly serious; a police investigation has begun, and Ms Rayner says she will step down if it finds she has committed an offence. But if she is cleared, her probable next job will be deputy prime minister in a Labour government. And although a great deal is known about her personally, from her first proper job (as a carer) to that boob job (paid for with a £5,600, or $7,030, loan), how she would approach this role is much less clear.

She has said that she will be “John Prescott in a skirt”, a reference to the plain-spoken deputy prime minister to Sir Tony Blair; her remit includes the party’s sweeping plans to bolster workers’ rights. But politically she feels elusive. There are complaints that she has been absent from the “smoked-salmon offensive” at which Labour has buttered up businesses over breakfast (“Is she locked in a cupboard?” asks one FTSE 100 boss). Her ideological leanings are hard to pin down.

Ms Rayner is clearly left-wing. But how left? Is she Corbynist or Starmerist? Marxist or—southerners often confuse the two—merely northern? She is “more centre-left, soft-left,” says Peter Mandelson, a Labour grandee. “She’s not hard-left.” Others imply that she lacks an ideology; the word “ambitious” recurs. Michael Ashcroft, a Tory peer and author of a critical unauthorised biography of her, goes further: some colleagues, he says, call her a “political opportunist”. So neither Marxist nor Corbynist, but Angela Raynerist.

She has cause to be happy in her own skin: her life is impressive. She grew up in Stockport, a town in Greater Manchester that Friedrich Engels—sounding rather less united with the workers of the world than usual—called “excessively repellent”. Home offered concrete floors, cold water and an illiterate mother. Other politicians are affluent enough not to know the cost of a pint of milk. Dairy was at times a luxury for Ms Rayner: her mother once gave them “shaving foam…as cream” because she couldn’t read the label. By the time Ms Rayner sat her GCSEs she was pregnant.

Her childhood was, in short, personally unenviable and politically invaluable. She once said that she has been treated as a “trinket”. Certainly to Labour, Ms Rayner is more than merely “Ange”; she is proof that the party that claims to be “not just of working people but for working people” still is that. She attracts the adjective “real”, as if the middle classes were mere mythology (which Labour, embarrassed by how bourgeois it has become, sometimes seems to wish they were).

Her political rise was rapid: a spell as a trade-union representative led to her becoming an MP in 2015, and a position on the Labour front benches just over a year later. Watch her speak, or read interviews with her, and it is easy to see why. She is charismatic and clever. Where other politicians fudge and waffle she talks about how she ate chips with chips as a child and became “a grandma at 37!” Interviewers often transcribe her speech with exclamation marks! Which can give it an alarming feel! It is a notable change from Sir Keir; he is clearly more a semicolon sort of man.

There are criticisms. She likes to play to a crowd—and British politics has enough crowd-pleasers. Some argue that the grim-up-north-ernness is overdone. Or, as one left-wing commentator put it: “Stuff your back story.” But the criticism has its own critics. Many detect misogyny in the terms, good and bad, that people use about her. Words such as “feisty” (broadly speaking used to mean “a woman who speaks”); “gobby” (a northern woman who does); and “trinket” (an attractive one who ditto) are not unloaded; “ambitious” is a notorious misogynist mantrap.

The more worrying criticism is that she is politically opaque; though to win the next election, it seems that all Labour needs to do is to continue not being the Tories and not saying anything egregious. Ms Rayner once said: “I don’t know when to shut up.” Arguably, it seems, she does. ■

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