Something about Angela Rayner seems to turn a whole lot of male politicians and commentators into jumpy teenage boys.
In the Sunday Times this week, Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, picked up on Boris Johnson’s portrayal of Rayner in 2021, describing her as “a flame-haired lioness”, vulnerable and anxious, and also “self-glamorising and self-mythologising”. In 2022, unnamed male Conservative MPs told the Mail on Sunday that Rayner crossed and uncrossed her legs to distract Johnson, then prime minister, when he was at the dispatch box.
Hurt and furious, Rayner told TV presenter Lorraine Kelly: “[They] talk about my background because I had a child when I was young, as if to say I’m promiscuous… I think that’s how they try and sort of deal with me. Because they don’t really know how to deal with me.”
Not just Rayner. That applies to anyone in public life who does not fit in or who breaks codes of class.
In this nation, one must know one’s place. Or else. Tony Blair’s deputy, John Prescott, for example, was routinely ridiculed because he didn’t speak proper. The Guardian‘s columnist Simon Hoggart was one of those scorners: “Every time Prescott opens his mouth, it’s like someone has flipped open his head and stuck in an egg whisk.”
Research in 2022 by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found just 1 per cent of Tory MPs entered Parliament from a working-class job. While 13 per cent of current Labour MPs had a working-class occupation, the proportion has halved since 1987. One-hundred-and-fifty years after Thomas Burt, the first working class MP, was elected to parliament, this is where we are. Digest those abysmal figures.
Among the small minority who do get in, insubordinate women cause more intense fear and distasteful excitement than their male counterparts.
Rayner provokes terror and prurience, including in her own party. The forthright feminist Labour MP Jess Phillips is also pilloried. She was accused of being a class traitor by left wingers. Trolls threaten her. One tweeted he would pour molten metal into her vagina.
Those relentlessly persecuting Dianne Abbott never sleep, the latest example being the grotesque racist attacks on her by a millionaire Tory donor. Another working class MP, Dawn Butler, has spoken about the loneliness of the job and how “there’s always somebody ready to criticise you, especially if you’re a Black woman. If I make a mistake it’s amplified.”
This has gone on through the decades and centuries. In my book Ladies Who Punch, 50 stories of women who refused to be defined and confined by society, I included the lissom Yorkshirewoman, Barbara Castle, another fiery redhead, fashionable, socialist who was a Labour MP from 1945 to 1979 and then a life peer.
She backed the Dagenham female machinist strikers, pushed through the equal pay act and safe driving measures, had an affair with a married journalist and was, according to political journalists, one of the most effective politicians ever. Yet Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell found Castle so insufferable, he told a journalist, “I could strangle her with my own hands”.
Think of the irrepressible and personable Mo Mowlam, who, according to her biographer Julia Langden, was humiliated by Tony Blair and hated by Gordon Brown while she was secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Peter Mandelson, her replacement, railed about “that woman” whilst admitting he would be “hopeless” in the job.
Talented and ambitious and independent minded women have to survive and thrive in this nasty, macho political arena seething with jealousies, enmities and bitter sexism, while misogynists in the media prowl and try to catch them out.
Rayner had a poverty-stricken childhood, took care of her bipolar and illiterate mother, got pregnant at 16, left school without GCSEs, worked in care and became who she is through joining the union movement. Her most tenacious hunters include Michael Ashcroft, previously a non-dom; Rishi Sunak, whose wife was also a non-dom for tax reasons; and Mail writer, Dan Hodges. They’ve got their teeth into the “lioness”. Their quarry is struggling. They won’t let go.
While it is quite proper that Rayner is investigated over her tax affairs and information she passed to the Electoral Commission, one cannot help but feel that this is in part driven by by deep class and gender prejudices. Male MPs like Nadhim Zahawi whose tax affairs were investigated were not pursued in this bloodthirsty way.
Whatever the results of the investigations into Rayner’s tax affairs and electoral rules, remember how hard it has been for her to be taken seriously as a politician. She recalls her first steps into that space: “It was like going into Hogwarts… it can be intimidating to think of all the people who have stood at the dispatch box before me, as well as mixing with people from huge wealth, privilege and with expensive education.”
For now, Keir Starmer is supporting Rayner. For she has personality, power and passion; she moves voters. And he doesn’t. For her part, Rayner has stated she will step down as deputy leader if a police investigation finds she has committed a crime. Starmer would be unwise to pre-empt this.