DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF ANGELA RAYNER

Britain has woken up to momentous news. Yes, yes, a Labour landslide, but along with that comes something else truly revolutionary - a flame-haired, 44-year-old grandmother is set to be deputy prime minister. And the power of this working-class, passionate northern woman becoming the second most powerful person in the land is not to be underestimated - as Angela Rayner herself has been time and again.

There’s a fine line between celebrating what makes Rayner uniquely placed to be a politician and risking patronising her for having ‘pulled herself up by the bootstraps’. But while her story has been told many times, it’s also what defines her political beliefs and makes the causes she fights for, as she put it herself during the election campaign, “personal”.

She is the product of poverty: born and raised on a Stockport housing estate, by a mostly out of work father and a bipolar mother, who couldn’t read or write, and was prone to self-harm. Deprivation — both material and emotional — were the norm. Rayner left school pregnant and with few prospects, aged 16.

Simply, she is that rare thing: a politician who can actually understand the lives of ‘real people’ — in focus-group speak — because she is one. Rayner and her siblings had to rely on their grandparents for a weekly hot bath. ‘I went without Sky TV’ is likely not one of the top complaints from her childhood. And how far the self-styled ‘Grangela’ seems from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘we have become a grandmother’ in 1989.

While most MPs talk about changing people’s lives without ever genuinely grasping how the policies they pass in Westminster will impact on the ground, Rayner knows of what she speaks. She has often acknowledged the role of state intervention in her life, from the free school meals that provided the only hot food she ate, to the Sure Start centre that helped her as a teenage mother and the tax credits that enabled her to set herself on a career path.

With social mobility in the UK at its worst for 50 years, according to a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report, it’s unlikely that a teenage single mum like Rayner would be able to rise to the position of Deputy PM today (or a single dad, for that matter). It means that when she says things like “[I’ll] fight every single day” to get real living wage for carers - having, herself, worked as a carer for Stockport council, as well having a young son with special educational needs and who is registered blind — it rings less hollow than usual. When she argues that not enough has been done to help women become an economic force in Britain, you’re inclined to think she might mean it. (Good job, then, that she’ll likely have the first female chancellor in Rachel Reeves, as well as a record number of female MPs, by her side). 

At the very least, it’s almost impossible not to be impressed that when Sir Keir Starmer tried to sack her, in his 2021 reshuffle, Rayner actually ended up being promoted instead - who wouldn’t want to possess that superskill? Plus, she has the respect of the trade unions, having been a union official herself before being elected as the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, in 2015.

 

Naturally, being a working-class woman from the north of England, who didn’t go to university, let alone read PPE at Oxbridge (seemingly the only official qualification for being in the Cabinet), has made her a target. 

Some of the criticism has come off as pure snobbery and sexism: the sneering at her Mancuniant accent by online trolls. Former deputy PM Dominic Raab mocking her for attending the opera. Boris Johnson’s supporters accusing her of trying to distract him in the Commons by crossing and uncrossing her legs. 

This week, we learned that she’s one of a number of politicians to have been targeted by a deepfake porn site. There have also been death threats - she has panic buttons installed in the home she shares with her two teenage sons by former trade unionist husband Mark. And don’t get me started on the recent housing ‘scandal’, which saw Rayner accused of failing to pay capital gains tax on a former house sale. She was cleared, but not before a months’ long police investigation - if only the sexual misconduct allegations against at least 56 sitting male MPs were taken as seriously. I wonder what could have made the difference? Rayner called it “misogynist and classist” and it’s hard to disagree.

With over two-thirds of female MPs having witnessed sexist behaviour in Westminster, these things need saying out loud. Having a high profile, outspoken role model like Rayner can only help face down that culture head on. 

“People underestimate me and I enjoy it when they do. It means I’ve got an advantage,” she once said. It’s hard to imagine that many will make that same mistake now.

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2024-07-05T11:06:03Z dg43tfdfdgfd