Big Ange is back. From a sketchwriter’s point of view I have to say that this is marvellous news. Rayner is actually an exceptionally old-fashioned politician. She’s akin to the union barons of the past, or perhaps even more accurately, to the Democrat mob bosses who ran Chicago or New York from the middle of the 19th century. I can picture her turning No. 10 North into a sort of Tammany Hall operation where she dishes out service contracts to choice clients with gay abandon.
Rayner’s way of conducting herself might echo the ‘beer and sandwiches’ sleaze of the past, but it has a more grating side. Had Ange just embraced her spivvery it would have just been another area where the government fell short, however, what makes it much more egregious is that it is married to breathtaking hypocrisy. Rayner sat down with Matt Chorley of the BBC and defended her decision to accept severance payments after resigning over her tax affairs, and not to repay the money now she is back in government. She tried to defend this on the basis that some of the Tories who did the same hadn’t been in the cabinet for very long at the time they were sacked. However, Rayner had previously called for much more exacting standards than this.
While in opposition Rayner tabled and voted for a parliamentary motion that would have prevented outgoing ministers from receiving any severance pay if they’d breached the ministerial code – which Rayner accepted she did at the time. Having tabled this motion, when her time came to resign in grubby disgrace she pocketed the lot; £16,876, which for less than a year of only existing on a backbencher’s salary isn’t too shabby. It’s certainly a lot of blueberry vapes. The question that should be asked now isn’t just whether she should repay the money, it’s why she took it in the first place. Rayner’s claim that some of the Tories were in government for a shorter time is hardly credible. Her own period in office was roughly co-terminous with the lifespan of the mosquitofish: she was hardly Lord Liverpool.
This points us to the awkward fact that Rayner might actually have more in common with the modern left than the old left after all. The progressive mind imagines itself to be morally pure and never considers how its own rules might one day apply to those who espouse its views. It is enough simply to be on ‘the right side’; one’s personal conduct then becomes beyond reproach. Having the right views on tax or gender or bloodsports makes you moral and therefore your own behaviour is irrelevant. Rules become for other people. To its discredit, this is something which the new right is also capable of, as the people who still choose to defend the obvious corruption of President Trump because he ‘owned the libs’ demonstrate. Either standards in public life matter, or they don’t.
Hilariously, there were attempts by some in Labour at the time of her tax scandal to claim that falling foul of HMRC was something many people could identify with. No, what was relatable about Rayner is that she likes a drink and clearly hated Sir Keir. Who is a five-figure underpayment meant to make her relatable to? Bernie Madoff?
Did these people think they’d do things differently?
Rayner’s example also points to a quite intense political arrogance and/or stupidity. The motion on severance pay was tabled in February 2024, so it was by then highly likely that Labour would be in government by the end of the year. Yet at no point does it appear to have crossed Rayner’s mind that her own side could possibly fall foul of the standards they set. You can see this in Starmer too and his tendency, in the dying days of Sunak’s time in Downing Street, to complain relentlessly about things he would later embrace, such as travelling abroad a lot and using a helicopter/private jet to get around.
Did these people think they’d do things differently? Did Starmer believe that merely the fact of having a Labour government would mean that bilocation would suddenly become possible? Either way, Rayner is now trying to tell people that it was ‘different’ when the Tories did it as they caused ‘chaos’. Putting aside the hilarious implication that the last two years have been Bismarckian masterpieces of good order, there is the bigger problem here that Rayner’s actions feed the now completely reasonable assumption of the majority of the public, that there’s no difference between any politician and that they are all, like Big Ange, on the make.
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