In Angela Rayner’s small and cluttered Westminster office, the functional and the homely coexist in an uneasy alliance. In one corner, an assortment of dresses, tops and jackets hangs on a small rail between a desktop printer and an ornately framed mirror. A large sofa takes up a lot of space, while two matching green armchairs face her desk, in front of which stands a huge electric fan – “When it gets really hot,” she says, laughing, “Ginger from Manchester starts to wilt.”
Several pairs of high-heel shoes sit by the sofa and a pair of pink polka-dot slip-ons nestle on the floor. Her choice of footwear has been a preoccupation of the tabloids, who have reported gleefully on her lace-up platforms, Kung Fu Panda heels and, most infamously, the Star Wars-themed creations she pre-ordered and didn’t receive. “I love shoes,” she tells me, “because, growing up, I had one pair of bog-standard black shoes with steel toecaps that my nana thought would last me and I got bullied for them.”
One wall is filled with ephemera, both personal and political, and on another, a red Perspex sign reads: Ready for Rayner. If the current opinion polls hold steady and Labour avoids a major scandal or the announcement of any radical policies that frighten off swing voters – both of which are unlikely given their leader’s unwavering commitment to extreme caution – the country should just about be ready for Angela Rayner to become the second most powerful person in the country after the next general election. “I’ll definitely be deputy prime minister, otherwise Keir’s got trouble,” she joked to Andrew Marr last October, describing herself as “John Prescott in a skirt” to Keir Starmer’s Tony Blair.
Seated behind her desk in a short-sleeved checked dress, Rayner is ebullient, passionate and down-to-earth, coming across as one of the few politicians in an otherwise capable but dull shadow cabinet who might actually be fun to hang out with. “The main thing is that she is relatable,” says her friend and colleague Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn. “I don’t want to be too unkind to my colleagues, but the parliamentary Labour party is not exactly full of people you’d choose to go to the pub with, but there are still some characters around and Angela is definitely one of them. She can be a law unto herself, but she hasn’t forgotten where she comes from or who she started out with. That’s quite rare in politics when people reach a certain level.”
Rayner is that rarer thing still, a Labour politician from a desperately deprived working-class background, whose first-hand experience – growing up in poverty, becoming pregnant at 16, and leaving school early with few prospects – is the defining element of her politics, and her life.
In parliament, she has been mocked by Dominic Raab for daring to attend the opera, the inference being it is not for the likes of her. A recent report said that 69% of female MPs had witnessed sexist behaviour in parliament in the past five years. A few weeks ago, SNP deputy Mhairi Black announced she would be stepping down at the next election, citing Westminster’s “outdated sexist and toxic” working environment. Rayner was famously accused by anonymous supporters of Boris Johnson of trying to distract him by crossing and uncrossing her legs, a tactic she describes as “ridiculous and abhorrent”.
For all that, she thinks that most parliamentarians of whatever political hue are decent and respectful people trying to do their job as best they can. “I speak to, and get on with, Conservative members, SNP members and Lib Dems,” she says, cheerily. “We’re all parliamentarians and it’s about respecting the fact that we are all here to represent our constituents. We may have a difference of opinion, and that’s fine, but we generally rub along OK. It’s the nasty, anonymous briefings to the press that give the idea that parliamentarians are a bunch of horrible, back-stabbing individuals, but I don’t recognise that on a day-to-day basis.”
She finds that many Conservative members approach her with a degree of trepidation or bemusement. “Quite a number of Conservatives are quite scared of me,” she says, chuckling. “They don’t know how to interact, because they don’t often meet people like me and it’s almost a bit awkward for them. I don’t think they are deliberately patronising or derogatory, it’s more that I’m a bit of an enigma. I bump into them and it’s like, ‘Oh! Hello…’”
On social media, she has been taunted for her accent, her appearance and simply for being a working-class woman in parliament. “Most of the trolling is misogynistic – calling me a bitch and things like that,” she says, shaking her head. “Or saying I’m thick because I haven’t been to university and can’t speak properly. Well, I’m not thick, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have got where I am today. And I speak like people do where I grew up and, guess what, being a woman does not make you inferior to a man.”
Altogether more serious were the death threats Rayner received last year, which resulted in a police investigation, seven arrests and three convictions. She has panic buttons installed in her house and her sons, aged 13 and 14, have security escorts to and from school after threats on their lives also. Her public appearances are risk-assessed in advance and she can no longer go for a night out with her friends when she feels like it.
Has she ever thought that the personal cost of doing her job was simply too high? “Yeah, sometimes, but, it’s not so much about me, it’s more the impact it has on everybody else around me. Being in the thick of it all the time does make you start to think that your decisions have an effect on the people close to you as well.” What keeps her grounded and resilient, she says, is the fact that she has already achieved so much against incredible odds. “I’m punching above my gene pool, because I’ve exceeded any expectations that I had when I became pregnant at 16.”
Speaking of expectations, I ask her if, hand on heart, she doesn’t have her sights set on becoming Labour’s first female prime minister. She answers without a moment’s hesitation, but not in the way I had expected. “No,” she says firmly. “My ambition is to get into government and to deliver on the New Deal for Working People and to have a legacy, so that I can say to my constituents and my grandchildren, we changed that, and, as a result, had an impact on people’s lives. That’s it. Whatever position I am holding when we do that is fine by me. I don’t have personal ambition in that regard. What I do have, though, is an incredible ambition to not fritter away this opportunity to help change people’s lives and I am determined to make sure that we get into government and do that.”
Northern, passionate, voluble and occasionally prone to distinctly unparliamentary outbursts – she once described the Tories as “homophobic, racist, misogynistic… scum” – Rayner has, by sheer force of will and canny positioning, risen through the Labour ranks since being elected as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in 2015. Given their marked differences in temperament and approach, her current double-act with Starmer is generally seen as a political marriage of convenience, a way of her boss signalling that, despite his intolerance of anything that smacks of leftwing radicalism, Labour is still in touch with its traditional roots.
“The Labour party has always been a broad church and it always will be,” she insists when I say that Starmer’s treatment of the left – the continuing punishment of Jeremy Corbyn, the expulsion of progressive thinkers such as Neal Lawson – seems unfair and intolerant. “It has to be because it’s not just about the party, it’s about voters.”
For people on the left like myself, I say, the party seems essentially centrist and in danger of drifting to the right. Where are the radical policies that would make a real difference to people’s lives? Will they renationalise the railways, make the private water companies accountable?
“We’re more pragmatic. I’m not for nationalising something that is going to cost us a load of money that we haven’t got when we’ve got kids starving and in poverty. If it’s a choice between regulation so that we get the best out of those services as opposed to spending money we don’t have on nationalising and instead using that money to bring children out of poverty like the last Labour government did, then every single day I’d be for regulation.”
She pauses to draw breath, just for a moment. “You know, politics is about choices, With the rail companies, we have said that once their contracts are up we would bring them back into public ownership and that’s a way of doing it. It’s not about an ideology, it’s about asking – will it improve people’s lives? If you are not getting value for money and [public services] are not delivering then we should be having a mechanism where local authorities under their democratic control are able to bring those services back in-house, to make the decisions, to improve the services locally and make them more accountable to local people.”
Rayner served her political apprenticeship as a leftwing trade union activist and describes herself as a socialist, albeit a “pragmatic” one. “Socialism for me is about community,” she says. “In the Labour party, we believe in our social values, we believe in communities, we believe that we should endeavour to be a community, be a group as opposed to an individual. So, for me, for instance, the basic principles around the Future of Workpolicy is socialism. It’s about society having minimum standards that we expect: to be safe at work, to have a contract of employment that tells you what your work is, and to not have to worry about being sacked the next day just because they can find someone who’ll do the work a lot cheaper than you.”
One imagines that the mere mention of the S-word is, in itself, enough to unsettle some policymakers in the Labour leader’s office, particularly those in thrall to the advice of focus groups and the fickle allegiance of those all-important swing voters. Closer to home, Rayner’s partner, Sam Tarry, was sacked last year as shadow transport minister after standing on a picket line with RMT workers and, as a result, was later deselected as a candidate for Ilford South.
Whatever tensions were ignited between her and Starmer seem to have been resolved for now, though there is much talk of an imminent reshuffle of the shadow cabinet, with Rayner tipped to become minister for levelling up.
Depending on who you speak to, her position as deputy party leader is either secure or constantly under threat from within. The Observer’s political editor, Toby Helm, believes moving Rayner would carry risks for Starmer. “Everyone is guessing what Starmer will do in a reshuffle, and when. I am not sure even Starmer knows yet. As for Rayner, she is smart, has been pretty loyal to Starmer as leader, and performs a very particular role reasonably well. I am not sure there is much to be gained by moving her. Why create bad feeling in what is a broadly united team in the run-up to an election?”
When I mention the stark differences in background, temperament and approach between her and her boss, Rayner shrugs and says: “It’s just who he is.” How would she sum up who he is? “Keir is the sort of person that wants to do a very good job in whatever they do. He has his standards that he sticks to. He’s the consummate professional.” Do they ever row? “No, you can’t have a row with Keir, he doesn’t row.” Has she ever been present when he has lost his temper? “I’ve never seen Keir lose his rag, no,” she says. “I have seen him get a bit frustrated.” Is his seeming lack of emotion not a bit frustrating at times? “Yes and no. I just know that his style is different. He has what he considers to be professional boundaries, in terms of how you conduct yourself, and he oozes that in the way that he does things.”
If leaked insider reports are to be believed, though, that is what happened when Starmer tried to sideline her after Labour’s disappointing results in 2021’s local elections. When news of his plan to sack Rayner as party chair and national campaigns coordinator emerged in the press, it sparked a backlash among several prominent Labour MPs and precipitated what the Guardian described as “a prolonged standoff”. To everyone’s surprise, except perhaps hers, she emerged from this with a promotion. As well as deputy leader of the opposition, she is now shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, and shadow secretary of state for the future of work.
For those such as Mags Hindle, who knew Rayner when she was a young and fiery Unison trade union representative for the north-west, her rapid political ascent is a testament, above all, to her self-belief and no-nonsense, hands-on approach. “She would fight everybody’s corner,” says Hindle, who first met Rayner when they were care workers in Stockport in 2001. “She wasn’t afraid of getting the job done, she’d just roll up her sleeves and get on with it. You couldn’t ask for a better ally.”
Does Hindle think that Rayner has had to tone down her more combative style? “She’s had to change, yes, because she operates in a different world now. She’s not that feisty 21-year-old any more. She’s grown as a person, as a woman. I do think she still has her union ethics at heart, but maybe she keeps them a bit more hidden. She’s someone who knows what she’s doing and what she wants.” Which is? “To get up to the top and hopefully stay there.”
A week after I meet Angela Rayner, I watch her in action from the public gallery of the House of Commons, where she is up against her Tory counterpart, Oliver Dowden, each of them standing in for their leaders who are attending an official celebration of the NHS’s 75th birthday. She acquits herself well in the pantomime cut-and-thrust of prime minister’s questions, at one point hitting back at a jibe with the quip, “The only thing that is not soaring in price at the moment is the Rt Hon Gentleman’s gags, which are getting cheaper by the minute.” It’s pure Rayner, but more revealing is the way she enters the chamber and stands patiently by the speaker’s podium, clutching her notes and looking self-contained to the point of fearless, as she surveys the opposition ranks. In moments like this, it would be hard for even her staunchest opponent to deny the lunar distance she has travelled from a spectacularly dysfunctional childhood on a Stockport housing estate.
That transformative journey is the source of her singular political character, and, as she mentions more than once, the reason she does what she does. “When I was growing up,” she says, “you were told to know your place and there’s a resilient part of me, a chip on my shoulder, maybe, that still thinks, No, why should I? Why should I be silent, or be changed, or have my rough edges smoothed off as some people might like? That would be a disservice to people who speak like me, that are from a background like mine. I want them to know, it is your place, too. It’s important to see and acknowledge difference, not silence it.”
While other politicians may talk theoretically about changing people’s lives through their policies, part of Rayner’s authenticity lies in the fact that her life was actually transformed as a result of state intervention. “Did I approve of everything the last Labour government did? Certainly not, but it did good things that impacted on my life in a positive way, whether it was the tax credits that got me back into work, the Sure Start centre that helped me when I was a young teenage mum, the free school meals that helped because that was the only hot meal I got of the day, or the Open University course that I was able to do because I didn’t get an education when I was at school. These things had a real tangible impact on my life.”
Rayner was born in 1980 and grew up on the Bridgehall housing estate in Stockport, Greater Manchester. Her father was on unemployment benefit most of the time until he left for good, while her mother lived with bipolar disorder and, at one point, was sectioned for attempting to kill herself after a period of self-harm. Deprivation was the norm in a house that had no hot water, the children depending on their grandparents, who lived nearby, for a weekly bath. “Even on a council estate there’s a status,” she says, “and I was at the bottom, the lowest on the pecking order. A poor kid from a poor family: I had tide marks on my skin because I hadn’t been washed enough. I was ginger, my hair was always scraggy, and the other kids used to call me a scrubber and horrible names like that.”
By the time she was 10, she tells me, she had become “a feral child”, staying out of the house as much as possible, often wandering the estate or playing on a disused railway line for hours on end. At 13, she was hanging out on the streets after dark with her best friend and, at 15, they had started drinking – “cheap cider from Bargain Booze, mainly”. The pair would sometimes catch the bus into Manchester to blag their way into clubs or spend hours wandering around the city’s airport, “just being scallywags and thinking we were the bee’s knees”.
Did she put herself in danger as a child? “Oh yeah, I put myself in hugely risky situations. I can see that now, as a 43-year-old grandma, but, back then, I thought I knew better. I thought I was a big adult who could look after myself and I was very bolshie about it. I didn’t understand the dangers because I didn’t have any parameters. Me and my friend thought we were 10 men, we thought we were on top of the world, whereas we were actually incredibly vulnerable children that probably needed reining in.”
At 16, and already a mother to her younger brother and sister, she became pregnant after her very first sexual encounter. “It wasn’t how I had envisioned it,” she says, sounding subdued for the first time today, “but I was where I was and I had to deal with it.” She pauses for a moment. “The sad thing about it was that everyone was just like, ‘Well, OK, that was going to happen’. There was this sense that it was inevitable that I’d end up like that. In a way, that just made me want to be a really good mum, and be able to provide, to prove everyone wrong.”
Soon after, she started working evenings as a home help and then a care worker, while her grandmother looked after her young son, Ryan. “Angela used to work the late shift and we’d cross over,” remembers Mags Hindle, “It suited a single parent bringing up kids, but it made me feel glad I didn’t have that pressure.” How did the young Rayner cope with shift work? “She had guts. I never heard her complain. She was a bundle of young energy, raising her children, earning some money. She was loved and respected by her colleagues.”
Rayner now regards her teenage pregnancy as the first turning point in her life, the moment when she found not just a purpose but a sense of self-worth. “Before then, I didn’t have any respect for myself because I didn’t think I was worth anything,” she says quietly. “I didn’t care about me, but all of a sudden I had a little being that I had to care for. I was somebody’s mum and I had to deliver on that.”
Another pivotal moment came when she joined Unison and became a successful trade union activist. “The sense of togetherness really gave me a bigger sense of purpose,” she says. “It made me feel like it didn’t have to be dog eat dog, that there were people out there who cared about each other. That kind of encouragement and support can turn people’s lives around. It’s what has got me through at different stages in my life.”
Given all that, one wonders what conversations she and her partner had after he was sacked by Starmer. Starmer’s reasoning was blunt and to the point: “You can’t sit around the cabinet table and then go to a picket line.” Does she agree? “I think the shadow cabinet needs to be a cabinet,” she replies straight away, “which means you should be in the boardroom making a difference and trying to resolve the dispute, so we don’t have the industrial action in the first place. That’s the point that Keir was trying to make. It’s not about how we don’t support workers.”
Hasn’t standing on a picket line always been a traditional Labour way of supporting – and showing solidarity – with workers? “I’ve been on many pickets myself over many decades, so I think it’s really important, yeah, but I think what is more important, as a shadow cabinet member who wants to be in government, is finding the solutions. Being on a picket line is symbolic support but it actually isn’t going to get us anywhere in terms of resolving the dispute.”
The magnitude of the challenges facing Starmer’s Labour party should it win the next general election is difficult to overstate given the parlous state of the economy. “Put simply,” a leading political pundit tells me, “there isn’t going to be any money, so they can’t fully commit to their key pledges, hence the extreme caution, defensiveness and lack of adventurous policymaking.”
Rayner agrees it is going to be “extremely difficult”, but remains upbeat. “There are still some things you can do – my Future of Work programme, for instance. Working with businesses that are doing the right thing now, making sure there is dignity in work. People who work hard should be able to pay their bills. People have absolutely no security in their work at the moment and that is unacceptable.”
Last week, in a keynote speech at the Institute for Government, Rayner set out in detail Labour’s proposed plan for an independent ethics and integrity commission to clean up government and restore public trust in the wake of the scandals and accusations of corruption that have dogged the Conservatives’ term in office.
Once she gets started on Labour’s goals it is hard to get a word in edgeways. When I tell her she could talk for England, she hoots with laughter. “My nan used to say, Ange, you could talk a glass eye to sleep.” I finish by asking her if she truly believes British parliamentary politics can be radically reformed under Labour’s watch in order to win back the respect it has lost. “Yes! And I am going to be part of the solution to make that happen. Respect is not a given. We have got to earn it, but we also have to put checks and consequences in place to make sure that nobody is above the law, so that people can have faith in the people that are there to represent them. I am determined to make that happen.” I wish her good luck on that front, but I doubt she needs it.