Angela is at the walking-corpse stage in this political stink
ANGELA Rayner is at the walking- corpse stage. This is the point in a Westminster stink when a politician drifts through Parliament and colleagues can’t quite decide: should they look the other way or peek at her through their fingers, more from ghoulish fascination than from any sense of Christian concern?
A lamb snagged on brambles, Ms Rayner is in a tangle over her property interests. Were she a ‘wicked Tory’ (to use a Raynerish phrase), it might not be so bad. We expect them to be canny. But Ms Rayner is socialism’s mighty moraliser, the clobberer of capitalism. Labour’s conscience!
When Boris Johnson was in the mire, Angela was as fiery as the most fervid Calvinist. Her pulpiteering was worthy of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunts play The Crucible. Boris was burnt at the stake. Great was the Rev Rayner’s glee. Now the faggot is smoking at her own feet.
Five minutes before noon, the Commons was almost full for PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer, who has started wearing butch- tight shirts and jackets in a pre- election image revamp, entered the chamber. Ms Rayner trailed behind him. They did not talk. Sir Keir gassed to colleagues. No one spoke to Ms Rayner.
To say she was off-colour does not do the job. She was almost luminous. Paleness defined her.
Do you remember the child on the TV adverts for Ready Brek whose silhouette shimmered? That’s how much the whiteness reverberated off her.
PMQs began. Little Rishi was on peppy form. The worse his poll ratings become, the more cheerful he seems. Relief? Or is he just resilient and certain of his case? Sir
Keir tried an opening wisecrack about Liz Truss’s new book. He thought he was being tremendously clever.
Mr Sunak: ‘ He ought to spend a bit less time reading that book and a bit more time reading the deputy leader’s tax advice.’
This scored instant, bellowing laughter. The Tory benches loved it, naturally. So did the filthy scribblers in the press gallery. Ditto Sir Keir’s official spokesman, who sits upstairs with us lot. He was laughing openly at Mr Sunak’s wisecrack for quite a long time.
Sir Keir himself looked tremendously cheesed off. It was the expression of a toopleasedwith- himself head waiter who has just stepped on a discarded grape and gone skidding on to his backside. His crossness made Tory MPs laugh even more. The popping of pride has slapstick value.
Ms Rayner just gave a wan smile. The old Angela would have jumped forward and given the PM a bit of filth. Plenty of us used to like that part of her character. To see her so becalmed was almost sad.
Sir Keir’s scripted attack was wrecked by Mr Sunak’s repartee. The nasal knight started gulping buckets of air.
HE resorted to priggishness – ‘ they don’t want to hear it!’ – and class war. ‘We’ve got a billionaire prime minister smearing a workingclass woman,’ he gobbled.
A working- class woman: is that all his deputy is?
Is that to be the sum of her achievements, the limit of her political personality? How patronising.
Sir Keir tried to make a thing of Mr Sunak’s desire to see national insurance tax eventually abandoned. He claimed this was an uncosted £46 billion liability. Well, it gave Sir Keir something to say in his disarray. Few at Westminster really see it as an immediate Budget commitment.
‘No more waffle!’ waffled Sir Keir. When he sat down, I suspect his backside throbbed from this caning.
Beside him sat a whey-faced Ms Rayner, the sometime red queen now an anaemic wraith. When PMQs ended she tried to pat Sir Keir on the back but he had accelerated so fast from her that her hand touched only thin air.
John Healey, shadow defence secretary and good egg, gave her a sympathetic pat. Peter Kyle, another Labour frontbencher, offered a half-hello. No one else bothered. She trailed from the chamber, green silk trousers a little too big, looking a fraction of her old self.