Angela rayner

Angela Rayner is formidable. Until today, that adjective never suited Labour’s deputy leader. She can be combative, authentic, eye-catching and crowd-pleasing — and quite annoying. Clearly she’s as tough as a vintage Land Rover. But at PMQs, she added statesmanship to her roster of qualities. The session was sparsely attended. The press are in Glasgow covering the Frequent Flyers Summit, aka COP26. Boris came south, by jet of course, to put in a stint at Westminster. He was met by Rayner, soberly dressed and steely-eyed. Her tactics were well prepared in advance. She used feints and misdirection to keep Boris guessing and she varied long rhetorical assaults with punchy killer-blows. She began with a couple of questions about the alleged misconduct of Owen Paterson.

The most annoying thing about Angela Rayner’s branding of the Tories as ‘scum’ was not that it offended some Tories, though no doubt it did. It wasn’t even the sad story it told us about the calibre of left-wing politicians in the 21st century, who seem more adept at reaching for playground insults than at making a cool, rational case against their opponents. No, it was the implication made by some that Rayner speaks like this because she is working class. That’s what working-class people do, right? They bark the word 'scum' at everyone. Such larks! When they aren’t gathered around a piano belting out hilarious songs they’re hanging around on street corners yelling the S-word at passers-by. Gawd bless ’em.

Labour's conference began yesterday and already there's a familiar feel to events. We've had the timeless Labour shenanigans over membership rules, with an under-fire leader forced to compromise for his union backers. The party's youth wing is on the war path, amid claims of organisers using 'dirty tricks' against Young Labour to scupper attendance at their events. Len McCluskey has done his bit to ‘help’ another leader by claiming he'd have backed Scottish independence and Starmer can't win the next election. And now a leading Labour frontbencher has overshadowed their major policy announcement with foul-mouthed comments about the Tories.

The firecracker and the damp squib stood in at PMQs today. With Boris abroad, the deputies took to the dispatch box. Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab have certain qualities in common. Both are eyeing the leadership of their parties and both are keen to offer a contrast with the present incumbent. The pendulum of popularity tends to swing in predictable directions. The dashing showman is often succeeded by the dead-safe dullard. Major after Thatcher. Brown after Blair. Why not Raab after Boris? And Angela Rayner’s eye-catching flamboyance would be a welcome change from the dreary swattishness of Sir Keir Starmer. Today was all about appearances. Raab will be pleased to note that he played to a half-empty house and bored everyone rigid.

As Keir Starmer’s re-run of the great Change UK centrist dad experiment sinks deeper into political quicksand, the importance of a party leader being able to project a compelling personality becomes ever more obvious. Even the pinko pundit class that was overjoyed by his election as Labour leader is now close to giving up on Starmer, whose lack of ringcraft reminds us that there is something to be said for career politicians after all. Ambitious shadow ministers with antennae more finely tuned in to the public mood than his are said already to be preparing prospective leadership campaign teams in anticipation of the voters of Batley and Spen delivering a devastating thumbs down to Starmer next week.

The resignation of Carolyn Harris as Sir Keir Starmer's parliamentary private secretary (more here from Steerpike) shows that the peace between Angela Rayner and the Labour leader is very much on Rayner's terms. Harris is reported to have left the job after being accused of spreading baseless rumours about the deputy leader's private life. There have been furious briefings from both sides over the past few days but Rayner has not had to sack anyone from her side, showing she has ended up with more power than Starmer. A number of her frontbench colleagues are also seriously impressed by the way in which she negotiated her new lengthy job title over the weekend, saying it showed how in control of things she was compared to Starmer.