The tragedy of Angela Rayner

It shows how ridiculously relieved I was to find a real, live working-class person in the modern Labour Party – and not just a desiccated simulacra of a prole, like the toolmaker’s son – that I initially took a liking to Angela Rayner. A carer for her sick mother at the age of 10, she became a mum at 16, an MP at 34 and a grandmother at 37. Only a fool would not acknowledge that she worked extremely hard to become a politician, when in such circumstances most of us would only have the energy for a binge with a box set at the end of a working day.

I was also drawn to her after observing the ceaseless amazement of the media at the behaviour of proletarian politicians as diverse as herself and Tory-Reform defector Lee Anderson. People who have rarely met compatriots from outside their own class are simply astonished by the outrageous way we oiks carry on, coming out and saying what we mean instead of straining it through several layers of sophistry. I found it somewhat affecting that she asked House of Commons transcribers not to correct her speech, leaving in her occasionally incorrect grammar ‘because it’s who I am’.

I liked the way she once stood up to Keir Starmer. She reminded me of the tough girls at my comp who I used to occasionally hold the earrings of while they got stuck in on the playground (that look on their faces as they removed them will always stay with me as the ultimate image of contemplative, combative female beauty). In 2021, he removed her as the Labour Party’s chair on 8 May, but her popularity in the party led to her being re-appointed as shadow first secretary of state, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work on 9 May. Images of a wildly revolving door accompanied by the Benny Hill theme came irresistibly to mind during this episode.

Rayner has always moved swiftly, shaking off whatever scandals she may become involved in. There was the silly one in 2015, when she wrote an angry letter to a shoe shop on Commons notepaper. She complained bitterly about how all the R2-D2 (yes, the robot from Star Wars) high heels had sold out after the shop failed to put a pair aside for her. Then there was a serious one earlier this year, when she was accused – and cleared – of tax evasion, after selling her former home, a council house, for a tidy profit. But bad optics from an opposition politician are nothing nearly as damaging as bad optics from a member of government, when Us becomes Them. The banana skins have come thick and fast for Rayner since she became deputy PM this summer, not least thanks to the ongoing ‘freebies’ scandal.

To be frank, I’d already gone off Rayner by the time Labour won the election, due to the fact that, like many Labour women, she is idiotically in thrall to the Church of Trans. We’re all aware of Labour’s women problem. It’s the only UK party never to have had a female leader, looking on like sex-scared schoolboys while every other party from the Greens to Britain First have been overseen by broads. But having said that, the current crop of Labour women are such traitors to their sex that it’s difficult to work up any sisterly solidarity. Having subscribed wholesale to the lie that men can be women, these transmaids devote a good part of their lives to making incels in wigs feel validated – and throwing women under the bus in the process.

During the deputy-leadership contest in 2020, Rayner signed a pledge to expel Labour members who were judged to hold ‘transphobic’ views – otherwise known as feminists who don’t believe that women’s spaces and sports should be trampled over by men called Melissa. It’s very hard to take someone seriously when one moment they’re making impassioned speeches about the disgustingly low conviction rates for rape and are the next day saying it’s fine for rapists to be housed in female prisons, as long as they claim to be ladies.

It says much about the current sacrosanct position of the powerful trans lobby in the Labour Party that Angela Rayner was happy to break ranks on questions like crime and punishment, but on trans issues will be a good little girlie again. ‘Shoot your terrorists and ask questions second… if you are being terrorised by the local thug, I want a copper to come and sort them out’, she said back in 2022. Yet in the same year, she told Sky News we shouldn’t get caught up on whether women can have penises: ‘All that does is damage people and it doesn’t help us go forward on some of the real issues that people are facing.’ Asked what a woman is, she once said: ‘I don’t think it’s for politicians to decide – people need to feel safe and that includes women who are transitioning.’ But how can a woman who finds herself in a confined space with a man satisfying his fetish feel safe? Unlike her more privileged sisters, Rayner has no excuse for turning a blind eye to the fact that working-class women suffer the most from the liberties transvestites take.

It’s not like her shabby behaviour since her triumphant accession has been a shock. But the grasping angle is new. She did at least seem genuine, and dedicated, when Labour were in opposition. Now, with her buckshee luxury holidays from a major Labour donor, and her personal taxpayer-funded vanity photographer, she seems like a parody of a corrupt Tory grandee in drag. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Lord Alli had gifted her with a duck house.

This stuff is going to stick to Rayner the hardest, because she had the most to lose. I was going to say ‘has’ but the past tense is better, because she really has lost it now. She might have been the first female leader of the Labour Party, or even its first genuinely working-class leader in more than a century. But she’s tossed it all away – and for what?

Rayner has already made an absolute knob of herself by blaming her acceptance of freebies on her ‘very working-class background’. Apparently, she was practically forced to accept a mini-break in a multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartment or she would have been forced into a time machine and been back selling matches in the Manchester snow before you could say ‘My Fair Lady’.

I did, until recently, respect Rayner for achieving so much, so young, especially in an age when social mobility – never great to start with – has so savagely reversed. As a survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies concluded last year: ‘It may be harder now than at any point in over half a century to move up if you are born in a position of disadvantage.’ But did Rayner really run so fast and come so far just to sacrifice her integrity in a souped-up Supermarket Sweep?

I’ve always loathed the words and the concept ‘goody bag’ – a basket of gifts for snout-in-trough types, generally rich and famous ones, given by wheedling merchants in the hope that they will publicise their products. At its most extreme, some of this year’s Oscar nominees were given a voucher for a $50,000 luxury holiday for 10 people to the Swiss Alps and a fridge containing 45 rare bottles of wine. In the past, they’ve included £20,000 watches and holidays in Tahiti. This is what the Starmer regime is – it’s the Goody Bag Government. When the PM made his conference speech featuring the line ‘Country first, party second’, are we sure he didn’t mean ‘Country first, party bags second’?

It’s okay for platinum-pensioned Sir Keir. He’ll duck out and go back to his lovely little NW twee life when his regime is laughed out of town. But Rayner will wear her disgrace as a scarlet letter-A for Avarice, forever. And it’s a shame, because she could have been a contender.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.