Picture Shows: Angela Rayner MP someone who might be leading the Labour Party one day.
It’s fair to say that Angela Rayner, an MP who could possibly become Labour party leader and therefore Prime Minister should Sir Kier Starmer decide that he’s lost the support of the wider party, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. There’s much to criticise her about ranging from the reports of course language and behaviour when the cameras are off through her presumed lack of education and her disastrous policies to her tax problems.
The general consensus out there seems to be that Angela Rayner would be a bad choice both as party leader and as Prime Minister. When it comes to policy or because she might be the might be one of the more left wing candidates with all that this political current entails, this assessment is probably correct.
However there’s one thing that Angela Rayner is good at and which Starmer or Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting cannot beat her on and that is personability. I’ve seen numerous videos of Angela Rayner in schools, community settings and doing general out and about stuff with the general public and these are situations that she appears to be at ease in. Whatever else Angela Rayner is, as a politician she looks like she’s happy to be among the public and you can’t say that about the Spam faced personality challenged droid who is currently in Number Ten, or Burnham or Streeting. We know what Rayner looks like and sounds like and can easily identify her in a line up, something you couldn’t say about either Burnham or Streeting.
Angela Rayner is much more advertiser friendly than either of the two front runners for the Labour leadership and she’s also, despite her tax issues, relatively untainted by the Mandelson scandal or the various issues surrounding the Prime Minister’s private office and his advisors. This distance from the omni-cancer that is eating away at the Prime Minister and those around him might be of great benefit to Angela Rayner should she choose to run for the leadership.
That doesn’t mean of course that she will be effective as a Prime Minister. She’s still going to have to content with the nation’s worsening financial situation and pressure from lenders as well as the increasingly fractured society in which we live. She could fail just as hard as Starmer is failing but she is probably personable enough and popular enough with Labour’s rank and file to be able to grasp the top job. She might be able guide the party in to the 2029 General Election reasonably competently but she might not win as events (‘events dear boy events’ as Macmillan once said are what sometimes kills off governments) in politics and economics might preclude such an election win.
I don’t particularly want Angela Rayner as Prime Minister but I can see a whole lot of reasons why Labour MP’s, Labour Party members and those in charge of Labour’s media might want her. She could rescue Labour if not from electoral defeat maybe at least from total destruction and this is because Rayner possesses that which Starmer cannot get and that’s a personality.
Rayner could attract back some Labour voters who have stopped supporting the party because of the prevalence in the party of the policies and mores of the middle class ‘metro-Left’. Whether that’s going to be enough to win back those votes that have gone to Reform is however very doubtful. The cultural and social bar that existed in some of what were once Labours ‘Red Wall’ seats was broken when many of the electors in these constituencies decided to have a punt on Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. Whilst these communities in my view misplaced their trust in the Conservatives the important thing was that the cultural cycle of voting Labour at any and every opportunity had been broken. Now that this taboo has gone so may well have many people who may have instinctively voted Labour but who now vote for some other party. These voters are going to be very very difficult for Labour to win back and I don’t even think that a personable individual like Angela Rayner can do that. All she can do is hold the fort until Labour’s likely defeat in 2029.