Kelly’s Eye

NEVER mind the trademark high heels, Angela Rayner is as tough as old boots.Which is why you’d have to be spectacularly gullible to buy the meek and mild Labour deputy leader who was doing the rounds of interviews last week expressing shock at the now notorious claims of leg-crossing to distract the Prime Minister in the House of Commons.

It’s clear Rayner had previously joked about the claim.What the episode should provide her opponents with is further evidence that she is a formidable operator. While her provocative description of Tories as “scum” was a more authentic character insight, and one she cannily wheeled back on after realising she’d overstepped the mark, it did her no lasting harm. Quite the opposite in some ways: voters are not averse to a bit of straight talking.

People also rightly admire the rise to the top of someone who left school at 16 with no qualifications after becoming pregnant. Her appeal cuts across party divides far more than her bland boss, who too often appears pre-programmed.

The most laughable aspect of the leg-crossing claim was that Rayner resorted to it as she “knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training” – because those supposed skills have done him a lot of good in recent months, haven’t they?

Westminster meanwhile is seized by a nervous breakdown over the numerous ensuing claims of sexism and misogyny in a way the wider public isn’t, though for most of us the spectacle of MPs watching porn in Parliament while insisting they thought they were looking up tractors lives down to our already scant expectations of our legislators.

Angela Rayner is one of the few of them who bucks that trend.