Not since the dark clouds of 1940 has Britain so required exceptional leadership. After five consecutive dud prime ministers, amid huge peril internationally and a precarious economy, the country needs someone with superhuman qualities – a visionary with the strategic nous of Winston Churchill and the financial acumen of the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes.
That someone is not Angela Rayner.
Yet Rayner shows signs of preparing to challenge Keir Starmer if May’s local elections go really badly. Last month, she warned “the very survival of the Labour Party is at stake” and the party is “running out of time”. And Rayner denounced the tough changes to immigration rules proposed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood as “un-British”.
She’s planning a new podcast, Beyond the Bubble, and her autobiography is in the pipeline. Remarkably, Rayner is the bookies’ favourite to succeed Starmer, even though her Cabinet experience is brief and she lacks important skills.
Don’t get me wrong. Rayner is a politician of unusual talent, especially given her past. Aged 16, she left Avondale High School in Stockport without a single GCSE above a D grade and pregnant with her first child. Rayner claims she was told she “would never amount to anything”.
No politician has risen so high from such lows: she lived on one of the worst estates in Europe; sometimes she was given nothing to eat. Her mother had bipolar disorder and couldn’t read. Her father was frequently absent and unemployed. From being a care worker and a local union official, Rayner became an MP and deputy PM. In contrast to Starmer’s very middle-class Cabinet, she’s genuinely working-class.
Rayner is determined, feisty, colourful and inspiring. She’s combined her politics with being a single mother to three children, one of them disabled.
In her union days, she was a skilled negotiator who got results. She’s a popular public speaker, and voters see her as passionate and genuine. You can understand why many Labour activists see Rayner as a possible saviour. Perhaps it’s time too, for Labour to be led by a woman, given the Conservatives are on their fourth woman leader, including three PMs.
But occupying No 10 requires extraordinary qualities, way beyond those of a Cabinet minister. Judgement, for example. Consider why Rayner resigned as Deputy Prime Minister and from her posts as Housing Secretary and Labour deputy leader last September. The Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, concluded Rayner breached the ministerial code by not paying the correct stamp duty on an £800,000 flat she’d bought in Hove in Sussex.
Rayner argued she’d acted on advice from a couple of lawyers. But Magnus found that both had told her they weren’t tax experts, and suggested she seek specialist tax advice. She didn’t do that.
She “cannot be considered to have met the ‘highest possible standards of proper conduct’ as envisaged by the [Ministerial] Code”, Magnus declared. It was especially unfortunate, Magnus said, that Rayner failed to pay the correct stamp duty when she made the purchase while Housing Secretary.
Rayner is currently waiting for the tax authorities to say how much extra stamp duty she owes. But a large cheque to HMRC for tens of thousands of pounds won’t simply wipe her reputation clean. Sure, it was a complex case and Rayner faced the distractions of high office. But “the responsibility of any taxpayer for reporting their tax returns and settling their liabilities rests ultimately on themselves alone,” Magnus insisted.
In 2024, Rayner was involved in a similar argument over whether she’d paid the right tax on a £48,500 profit from a former council house she’d bought under Right-to-Buy in 2007, then sold eight years later. Rayner was accused of not paying Capital Gains Tax on the profit, although it appeared not to be her main home. Both HMRC and Stockport Council cleared her, though her behaviour looked unwise for the deputy leader of a party keen to build council houses, not sell them, and to reduce tax avoidance.
Then there was the freebies episode, when Rayner accepted £3,550 worth of new clothes from Labour donor Lord Alli, as well as enjoying a break in Alli’s flat in New York. Again, it didn’t smell right.
How do such actions look to those working-class voters Rayner claims to represent, millions of whom have deserted Labour because they think “politicians are all on the make”? All three stories suggest carelessness and poor judgement – vital prime-ministerial qualities.
Nor does Rayner have the seriousness – the gravitas – to be Prime Minister. In the Commons in 2020, she denounced a Conservative MP as “scum” and had to apologise after being reprimanded by the deputy speaker. She likes that word. In 2021, Rayner was recorded at a Labour event calling the Conservative government “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum!”
Most importantly, in the three fields which today dominate No 10 – the economy, foreign affairs and defence – Rayner has almost no track record. She’d be an unknown character to Nato and European allies. Would Rayner lead the “coalition of the willing” in defence of Ukraine, as Starmer has? Would she suddenly get a grip on defence capability and spending, where Starmer has woefully failed?
Negotiating with foreign leaders requires a lot more than arguing with council officers over unfair dismissals. Foreign affairs and economics are highly complex: it would take months for Rayner to get up to speed. When Britain is probably weaker in these respects than we have been for centuries, as former prime minister Gordon Brown once said, it’s “no time for a novice”.
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