Riddle of her ex-aide’s thriller
HOW do you take revenge against your ex-boss if you’ve signed a binding nondisclosure agreement (NDA)?
Matt Finnegan, who was once Angela Rayner’s chief adviser, found an ingenious way of doing so.
For two years, he’d written her speeches, crafted policy and helped daily to steer her responses to key issues.
Then in 2017, he left Rayner’s office abruptly — while on sick leave with diabetes — in circumstances that have never been made public.
Labour sources say Finnegan was deeply hurt. His subsequent action for ‘unfair dismissal and disability discrimination’ was settled — but apparently only after then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell learned that Finnegan had kept numerous texts and emails from Rayner.
‘They were considered to be explosive and immensely damaging to her. McDonnell used his influence to knock some sense into Angela’s head, and things were then resolved,’ said a Labour source.
The Labour Party offered Finnegan £20,000 on condition he signed an NDA. After that, he published a political thriller — with the title Betrayal.
The plot centres on a ruthless Labour MP, Abigail Jeffers, who is caught making a bogus expenses claim for a hotel bill after a drunken one-night stand with a fellow member of the Shadow Cabinet. After the Shadow Chancellor finds out, he tells her to resign.
When he falls into a diabetic coma, Abigail gives him a fatal overdose of insulin to conceal her misdeed. Her crime is eventually discovered by a Daily Mail journalist.
While this story is obviously far-fetched, some of the descriptions of Abigail are all too realistic. Like Rayner, she’s a young MP with a Northern seat. She is ‘gobby but bright’, having ‘never had a proper education’, and has a child ‘whom she gave birth to at the age of 16 and who figured in many of her speeches’.
She was also a Unison shop steward, and soon after her election as an MP, she is promoted to become the Labour Party’s education spokesperson. On top of that, she has long hair and a penchant for colourful shoes.
Even the Star Wars shoes episode is alluded to, when Abigail breaks House of Commons rules by using official notepaper to book a table at the Ivy restaurant in London.
Another ‘coincidence’ concerns Abigail’s computer password: ‘VomitBreath69’. A friend of Rayner’s says the MP is known to have used this password as well.
‘Angela used to tell a story that when she and [her ex-husband] Mark went on their first date, they had a bad Indian meal and in the hotel room afterwards they were both sick, so “vomit breath” became her Commons password,’ says the friend.
Finnegan has only spoken about Betrayal once. When asked whether he had based Abigail on Rayner, he said: ‘People who read the book will draw their own conclusions about the characters in it and what happens when politicians pursue power ruthlessly.’