I first ‘met’ Angela Rayner on an online campaigning call during lockdown. A round of introductions where we each spoke briefly about the work we did as campaigners, then Labour’s Deputy Leader broke the spell of what had become a somewhat severe atmosphere.
Taking us on a brief detour through action movie history, we spent a few minutes discussing our favourite entry in the Lethal Weapon franchise.
As the call drew to a close, the few of us left did whatever the Zoom equivalent of looking around a room when someone new leaves is: assessing the impression they had made. Our collective mouths hung open, recognising the political equivalent of sweeping a metal detector over a beach and hearing the buzz as a rare substance is identified: “She’s… normal.” Rayner, as we all know by now, is not a typical career politician. A typical career politician would have known how to get the best advice to at least appear spotless in her current stamp duty predicament, even if they knew they were doing wrong. A typical career politician would perhaps have been a bit more paranoid in their choice of law firm.
Most Labour activists have spent years in the company of career politicians, door-knocking for MPs with the charisma of a wilting cabbage. Anyone who has canvassed in an election will recognise the head-scratching, “How did they get this job?” questions in the pub afterward. For a politician to survive Westminster’s grip and still exude warmth, as Rayner does, rather than sounding like a Dalek – that itself is an achievement.
To Parliament’s phalanx of career politicians, ex-lobbyists and soon-to-be-lobbyists, there is a clear threat posed by a politician who isn’t made of wood.
With Rayner struggling to explain the complicated legacy of her actions during her separation, and as part of her duty as a mother to a disabled child, an opportunity has arisen. Politicians of all stripes, unified by their affinity for debating with the bizarre outstretched-thumb gesture – what some of us (myself included) call “Oxbridge Thumb” – could seek to curtail the ambition of Labour’s most prominent human-form MP.
AI meme videos depicting Rayner as a chain-wearing, tracksuit-toting rapper smoking cigarettes in council estates are already making the rounds on social media. The ugly snobbery of Britain is never far from centre stage whenever Rayner is discussed. Even after rising to the top of politics and commanding some of this government’s most significant policy areas – from workers’ rights to housing – there is still a group of Britons for whom Rayner will always retain the accent and general affect of someone perceived to be self-evidently unintelligent. What working-class person will not recognise how held back they have been by exactly that stigma?
Labour members – most of whom are unhappy with the government – see Rayner as the heir apparent to the current leadership. With Keir Starmer’s approval ratings somewhere beneath the Mariana Trench, many party insiders have set a mental milestone of next May’s expected local election wipeout as the point when a replacement will be sought. Plans are being made.
To demote Rayner now, and find a way to make a scandal damage her public image, would certainly be a win for those hoping to succeed Starmer. Wes Streeting – nursing a tiny majority and almost guaranteed to be a primary target for Corbyn’s Your Party in 2029 – will know that this might be his one opportunity to become prime minister. Andy Burnham – widely expected to step down as Mayor of Greater Manchester and again secure a seat in Parliament – must also be wondering whether he could save Labour from electoral drubbing.
Aside from the electoral question, Rayner represents an archetype of the Labour Party, and the wider labour movement, that was once common but is now critically endangered – vanishing not just in Britain, but across every OECD nation with a left-wing political party. This archetype is: a person who has spent the majority of their life in a working-class career.
In contrast to Rayner’s years working in front-line care, Streeting and Burnham have never held a job outside politics. Burnham went straight from studying at Cambridge into a political research role. Streeting, who overcame as many disadvantages in life as Rayner, still worked in a student union role before becoming a Labour lobbyist.
The same is true of the other potential challengers: Yvette Cooper moved directly from Oxford and Harvard into politics. Bridget Phillipson graduated from Oxford and then briefly worked at her mother’s charity before becoming an MP in her mid-twenties
This is the standard career trajectory of any Labour MP in the modern era. For all its pretence to being “For The Many”, this did not change under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership either. Prior to Labour’s landslide in 2024, roughly three in four Labour MPs entered Parliament from an “instrumental” career: party officials, researchers, lobbyists – people whose careers were entirely professional politics. The most common former career for a Labour MP elected in 2024 was “lobbyist”.
Rayner is one of the only MPs left in Labour without a university education – still the most common educational background for British people. The unlikeliness of her place as a Labour MP is something the party has attempted to dilute, pretending that state-school-educated Oxbridge graduates who have worked in politics their entire lives make up a more working-class cabinet than ever before, simply because they did not attend private school.
For decades, parties of the left have been sidelining and shutting out people with backgrounds like Rayner’s in favour of family dynasties of professional politicians and those in elite careers in law and politics. According to Professor Noam Lupu, an academic at Vanderbilt University studying class in politics, the median proportion of legislators from working-class careers across OECD democracies has collapsed to 3 per cent. Whether a political party is left-wing or right-wing makes no difference to this collapse.
The IPPR report Closing the Gap: Parliament, Representation and the Working Class (launched by Rayner in 2022) placed the number of working-class MPs in the previous Parliament at 7 per cent. No effort was made to change this by Labour in 2024, and the landslide victory barely moved the needle at all.
Studies of the 2024 MP intake, conducted by academics at the University of Antwerp, show that only 5 per cent of candidates selected to be PPCs (not those who won election, but those who were chosen) had a background in blue-collar work.
In 2023, I started an initiative, Blue Collar Parliament, in an attempt to bring this collapse home to the wider Labour Party ahead of an election win. Results were mixed.
Speaking at CLPs around the UK, I began to form a bingo card of common responses given by Labour members when presented with the problem of collapsing working-class participation in politics. Common responses were: “We already have Angela Rayner,” “We don’t want another Lee Anderson, do we?” or my personal favourite, simply for horror value: “Someone from a working-class career can probably make a good local councillor, but wouldn’t be as good at policy as a barrister.” The concept of an MP as an envoy, battling for the morality of the party that elected them, has been completely subsumed to a process-oriented view of Parliament – a place where eggheads properly audit and rubber-stamp the nation’s decline.
Labour now has a generation’s experience of nominating a talismanic working-class person into the deputy leader role as a symbolic sop to a former era. John Prescott’s death last year at the age of 88 bookended this practice, having entered the Labour Party in an era when a face like his was still commonplace in politics. Rayner ascended to the role in a different era altogether, when working-class estrangement from Labour has never been higher, and working-class people are less common than ever in its ranks of members and MPs.
A prominent living link to a time when the Labour Party had a clear identity and purpose – something so lacking in the current administration’s ‘mission-led’ blathering and blundering that has categorically failed to inspire the public. It is clear Labour is beginning to panic about what its legacy will be and who will lead it in the next election. One look at the polls, and it is clear why knives are being sharpened; but as it stands, Rayner is the rope tying Labour to society at large. Cut her loose, and Labour will find itself in freefall.
[See also: Angela Rayner is a victim of Britain’s housing crisis]
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