How party’s priceless asset could turn into a liability
ONE is an urbane, Oxford-educated north London lawyer, the other is a gobby working-class Northerner prone to getting into scrapes for speaking their mind.
We could be talking here about Tony Blair and John Prescott, but the description just as neatly fits the current Labour leadership of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner.
And in a week when Ms Rayner is under more scrutiny than ever before thanks to controversy over a house sale, the same questions are being asked about her as were once asked about Prescott: is she a priceless asset to the party or a hopeless liability?
Ms Rayner brings to Labour’s front bench the sort of authenticity that none of her colleagues can match. While the party’s image-makers love to remind people of her rise from teenage single mother to shadow deputy prime minister, her appeal to the wider public lies in her perceived honesty.
Pollsters say she brings flavour to politics at a time when the main party leaders are as spicy as mashed potato, and her flat Stockport vowels are a useful counterbalance to Sir Keir’s lawyerly delivery.
Until now, her unique brand has proved immune to such controversies as her description of Tories as “scum”. It was the verbal equivalent of John (now Lord) Prescott punching a member of the public in 2001, which was met with a shrug by Blair (now Sir Tony) as he said: “John is John.”
Merely saying that “Angela is Angela” will not be enough to diffuse the crisis facing Labour’s current deputy leader, as her house sale is being scrutinised by the police and, in the year of the general election, her popularity with the public could be in genuine danger.
James Frayne, the founder of the policy research agency Public First, says until now Ms Rayner has been a “crazily huge asset” to Labour but that her popularity could be damaged beyond repair if voters decide she is not as honest and straightforward as they thought she was. He said: “Four or five years ago she got a mixed reaction in focus groups, some people really liked her and some people really didn’t, but two or three years ago she started being brought up a lot in focus groups, unprompted, especially by what you might categorise as workingclass swing voters.
“They described her as honest, authentic and bracingly different, and even now she is the only politician of any party that working-class voters name as someone they like.”
That could all change, however, depending on the outcome of a police investigation into her financial affairs.
To recap: Ms Rayner, who purchased her council house in 2007 under the Right to Buy scheme, sold it in 2015 and made a profit of £48,000.
She says it was her main residence, meaning she was not liable for capital gains tax (CGT) on the profit. And that would be the end of that, were it not for the fact that five years earlier, after her marriage to Mark Rayner, she had re-registered the births of her two youngest children at his address, raising questions about whether that was in reality her main residence. If that were the case, her former council property would be a second home and liable for CGT, as married couples can only count one property as their main
‘Prescott was useful for speaking to the party machine, Rayner is useful for speaking to the public’
‘Her appeal is not based on policy ... it’s because she is seen as tough and honest’
home under HMRC rules. Ms Rayner, who became MP for Ashton-under-lyne in the same year that she sold the property, has said that like anyone else she simply put her house on the market, used a solicitor and an estate agent, and was not aware of the HMRC rules at the time.
Since the tax questions have arisen, she says, she has taken advice from an expert which was “categoric that I do not owe any capital gains tax”.
Sir Keir has given his backing to his deputy’s decision not to publish her tax advice, saying he has “full confidence” in her.
Greater Manchester Police, which initially said Ms Rayner would not face an investigation, is now looking at the case again, and has assigned a detective chief inspector to reassess the matter after James Daly, the Tory deputy chairman, complained that officers had not contacted witnesses or looked at relevant documents.
Regardless of the outcome, Sir Keir cannot sack Ms Rayner, because deputy leaders are directly elected by Labour members. Whether he might want to is a more interesting question. Sir Keir did sack Ms Rayner from a role as Labour’s campaign coordinator after the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, when the Conservatives won the seat from Labour with a huge swing. There were even rumours that Ms Rayner might challenge him for the leadership. The following year she told the BBC Sir Keir needed to put “more welly” into his job, suggesting tensions were not far below the surface.
Labour insiders say that Sir Keir has now come to accept Ms Rayner, who he trusts to stand in for him at Prime Minister’s Questions and can see that, like Prescott before her, she is a net asset to the party.
Ms Rayner is far more popular than Prescott ever was, Mr Frayne says, and more useful.
For starters, Sir Tony was far more popular than Sir Keir, and didn’t really need to be buttressed by a rufty-tufty Left-winger.
Prescott’s primary role was as a bridge between New Labour and old Labour, especially the unions, who always remained suspicious of the privately educated Sir Tony and preferred dealing with a plain-talking former shop steward in the form of the then MP for Kingston upon Hull East.
Rayner, in contrast, is a bridge between the north London dinner party set that dominates Labour ideology and the Red Wall seats that defected to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019.
Added to the mix is the fact that Sir Keir is no Sir Tony. It is no coincidence that Ms Rayner’s sudden surge in popularity has coincided with the era of Sir Keir and Rishi Sunak, two leaders who are, to many voters, so bland as to be indistinguishable from each other.
Mr Frayne says: “Prescott was useful for speaking to the party machine, Rayner is useful for speaking to the public.
“Whether she retains her popularity depends on whether the issue about her house affects the way people see her.
“Her appeal is not based on policy or anything ideological, it’s because she is seen as tough, honest and truth-telling, and if people decide that is no longer the case there is no coming back.”
One person who knows how this works is Mr Sunak. During the pandemic he was seen by the public as honest, different and fresh as he masterminded the furlough scheme, but his involvement in Partygate and controversy about his family finances turned voters against him and his poll ratings have never recovered.
Whether Ms Rayner’s popularity goes the same way would now seem to be in the hands of Greater Manchester Police.