“Ms Rayner”, a recent Times leader column noted in high serious tones presumably baffling to any overseas readers, “is Marmite.” To those who dislike her, our Ange is an “ambitious”, “foulmouthed”, “ill-educated” “self-publicist”, all but singlehandedly responsible for the government’s failure on both housebuilding and youth unemployment. Others, by contrast, quite like her. I’ll leave you in suspense as to which side the paper of record is on.
This was actually positive enough to pass for a nuanced position on Rayner from the ever-righteous truth-seekers of the British press. Strange to relate, there seems to be something about a working-class woman having fun and wielding power that the papers find simultaneously titillating and unseemly. See the Telegraph’s breathless report from yesterday (5 May) about her quitting vaping. “Euch,” runs the overwhelming consensus. “Marmite tastes horrible.”
Consider this not even slightly pathetic “exclusive” from the Mail. Therein, we learn that Rayner recently had such a good night in parliament’s Strangers Bar that on exit she collided with a door and promptly bent double – an incident to which the paper connects the fact she was also seen drinking a glass of wine as recently as last month. (Repairs to the next door the next day were, the report reassures us, purely coincidental.)
Actually, although Rayner is variously described as “trollied” and “obliterated”, a careful reading of the story reveals a countervailing narrative in which she was perfectly fine and is even drinking less these days. No matter: it gives the Mail a perfect excuse to run a fair and balanced poll asking readers if they’d like to see her as prime minister. Your choices are “She can’t be worse than Starmer,” and “Oh yes she can.” Great stuff.
All this is positively well-hinged compared to the Facebook boomer post passing as a Telegraph column from Planet Normal podcast host Allison Pearson, which warns that “Prime minister Angela Rayner would be a new low for Britain”, and contains some capitalisation choices you rarely find in a broadsheet newspaper. Rayner, Pearson says, is “a gobby know-nothing in flappy trousers the colour of toilet cleaner”, an antipathy that seems to date from (this is a twist) before Rayner was even born. The “Angelas”, Pearson writes, were the girls who would disrupt the lessons, scare the teachers, and have underage sex; the real working-class heroes, by contrast, were those who saw “opportunity and grasped it with both hands”. If Pearson feels any cognitive dissonance in accusing a woman on the threshold of Downing Street of not grasping opportunity, she does not let on.
And so it goes on. We’ve had Sun columns calling Rayner the “Red Queen”, complete with chess-based photoshops, in a desperate attempt to coin a nickname that has utterly failed to catch on. We’ve had hysteria about the “million-pound war chest” which turned out to be a £50,000 contribution to office costs from a man who makes fridges. (I’ve not noticed the £5m from a crypto billionaire received by Nigel Farage getting similar treatment but to be fair I’ve been busy.) We’ve had that widely discussed secret meeting with Andy Burnham. Between the gossip and the salaciousness and the sheer, overwhelming vitriol it’s remarkably difficult to work out what’s actually going on.
On the former deputy PM’s divisiveness, at least, the Times is bang on. The story of the girl who left school with no qualifications and pregnant, yet rose through hard work and the trade union movement to be deputy PM, should surely be a symbol of everything a supportive state and a Labour government can achieve. Yet while YouGov’s “most popular Labour politicians” tracker currently has Rayner in second place, behind only (oh dear) Andy Burnham, that’s just a ranking by the number of people who’ve a positive opinion. Click through and you’ll find her disliked by twice as many people (48 per cent) as like her (24 per cent). Whether this is misogyny, classism or anti-northern prejudice is also hard to discern. Knowing Britain, it’s probably all three, with a dash of anti-ginger prejudice for flavour.
Even so, there remain signs Rayner still has a bright future ahead. Saturday Night Live UK has yet to impersonate either Burnham or Wes Streeting, and the less said about the questions raised by its David Lammy the better. But to cheers, on last week’s episode, it unveiled Celeste Dring as the only person ever to have played both Rayner and Princess Eugenie, and proceeded to have her knock Starmer out. That doesn’t mean the writing room thinks she’ll take over, of course – merely that there’s fun to be had, in a way Streeting (Larry Dean, you mark my words) does not offer. Nonetheless, it suggests the satirists, at least, hope she’ll be around for a while. Protest as they might, I suspect some in Fleet Street feel much the same.
[Further reading: Is Andy Burnham actually the answer?]
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