UK
OPINION - Could voters see Rayner as a Trojan horse for the Left?

James Kirkup
Mon, 14 August 2023 

Deputy leader Angela Rayner with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (Peter Byrne/PA) (PA Wire)

“John Prescott in a skirt.” That’s Angela Rayner’s well-practised line to describe her relationship with Sir Keir Starmer. The words are carefully chosen, intended to remind people of Tony Blair’s long-serving deputy, a word-mangling former trade unionist whose loyalty to Blair underpinned the New Labour project for more than a decade.

But Rayner isn’t Starmer’s Prescott. Her relationship with her leader is fated to be much more complicated. Prescott is 15 years older than Blair and abandoned any hope of leading Labour when the younger man beat him to the top job in 1994. Angela Rayner is 43, some 17 years younger than Starmer. Prescott saw his role as deputy leader and deputy prime minister as the end of his career. No one at Westminster thinks that this is Rayner’s last job.

The fact that she could one day take the top job means some tension between her and Starmer is inevitable. That tension is only heightened by the fact that Rayner is more charismatic and, frankly, interesting than her leader.

Labour’s deputy leaders are always important figures in the party because they’re not hired — or fired — by the leader but elected by the members. That means they have a mandate and a power base of their own. Such a power base needs to be carefully maintained though, for instance by making sure your allies and supporters get selected for winnable seats. Starmer’s team have been working hard to ensure such seats go to loyal, centrist allies, much to the chagrin of the Labour Left.

Some Left-wing Labour members and trade unionists hope Rayner will be their champion at the top of the party. She’s a former care worker and union organiser who came up on the Left of the party and backed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Right now, though, the most important audience for Labour isn’t those Left-leaning activists. It’s the floating and undecided voters and soft Tories the party needs to win over if it is to achieve any sort of majority in the Commons. Will former Tory voters in places such as Stevenage and Milton Keynes warm to a blunt-spoken Mancunian who repeatedly backed Corbyn and has described Tories as “scum”?

Conservative election planners hope not. A key plank of Tory election strategy is to paint Starmer’s Labour as unreformed socialists intent on taxing and spending and waging a Corbynite war on wealth and aspiration.

On paper at least, Rayner should be perfect fuel for the Tory campaign PR machine — living proof that Labour hasn’t changed and that Starmer is just a front for old-school Corbynism.

Rayner, after all, was a consistent backer of Corbyn and his policies. She joined his shadow cabinet in 2016 when many Labour moderates turned against him, and remained part of his top team as voters overwhelmingly rejected Labour in the 2019 election. Of course, much the same is true of Starmer, who served in that same shadow team and once called Corbyn a “friend” who would make a “great prime minister”.

Labour’s leader today wants to distance himself and his party from Corbyn. The more voters see of a self-described “socialist” deputy leader who was a prominent part of the Corbyn team, the more open they may be to claims that she is a Trojan horse meant to let the old Labour Left into power.

In reality, she is a much harder target for Tory spinners, because of the striking discipline she is showing in remaining on-message with the Starmer agenda. When he surprised his colleagues by announcing that Labour would keep the Conservatives’ deeply controversial “two child limit” on welfare claims, it would have been unsurprising to see Rayner expressing doubts. After all, she has previously described the policy as “obscene” and cruel.

Yet when Labour MPs raged about Starmer’s position at a recent meeting in the Commons it was Rayner who took the flack for the leadership. Likewise when Starmer hardened Labour’s line on trans issues to declare that a woman is an “adult female”, Rayner, an outspoken advocate of trans rights, could have played to the Left-wing gallery by dissenting. Instead, she kept quiet.

Will she toe the line all the way to the election? No one should be surprised by her discipline and professionalism. You don’t go from being a teenage mother on a depressed council estate to Parliament and the shadow cabinet without formidable drive and determination. And Rayner can count. Today, Starmer leads a party that’s 20 points ahead of the Tories in the polls. This is not a time to be seen challenging the boss. Better to knuckle down, and maintain your base in the party for the future.

If she’s moved to a new position in the shadow cabinet at a reshuffle next month, bet on her accepting the move graciously rather than publicly resisting a switch as she did in 2021 when Starmer was in a much weaker position.

The real tests for the Starmer-Rayner relationship will come if and when their party takes power. A Starmer government may lack a big Commons majority and expects to have very little money to spend, meaning a cautious safety-first agenda. That’s a recipe for discontent among Labour activists hungry for boldness and looking for someone to champion their cause in government, perhaps in the hope of taking over in due course. Angela Rayner isn’t Keir Starmer’s John Prescott but she could become his Gordon Brown.

James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation