Over the coming days, two very different lives will be the focus of national attention.
One is that of an Eton and Oxford-educated Baronet with a career behind him as a city financier. The other emerged from Avondale High School in Stockport with no qualifications after dropping out at 16 after she became pregnant. Her own mother, one of 12 kids born to unemployed parents, had bipolar disorder and struggled to cope.
As a result, that little girl who would go on to become Deputy Prime Minister remembers the house being a tip, tidemarks of dirt being visible on her skin, and eating sausage with chips – or chips with chips – for tea. On Sundays they walked two miles to her nan’s high-rise for a bath. At five years old she played on the local railway tracks.
Could the lives of Angela Rayner and the Prime Minister’s independent adviser Sir Laurie Magnus be any different?
And yet now their fates have been thrown together. Magnus holds Rayner’s future in his hands, and his own future in the role depends on making the right call on whether she was remiss in failing to pay £40,000 of stamp duty on a new flat in Hove.
Yet despite having lived two very different lives, there is one thing the pair have in common – they are both highly regarded as exceptionally good operators.
Angela Rayner is the backbone of this Labour Government. Respected by working people, loved by the party faithful, reared in the union movement, she is warm, brave and a possessor of that holy grail in modern politics: “authenticity”.
All that and she gets stuff done – the workers’ rights bill which gives employees greater protections, and ends exploitative zero-hours contracts and fire-and-rehire processes by bad bosses, is one of the most popular policies of the past year. Her swift action on housebuilding and planning will do much to end a housing crisis that has blighted this nation for decades.
It will be little short of a tragedy if she has to step down.
But Laurie Magnus is equally well respected, intelligent and has an ability to get things done. It took him just six days to conclude that former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi had breached the Ministerial Code over his tax affairs, and eight days to report on “regrettable” actions by city minister Tulip Siddiq which led to her standing down.
If Magnus concludes Rayner took insufficient care in her affairs ahead of buying the Hove flat she is in big trouble – regardless of her ability, her authenticity, or even her humble background.
There has been much talk in recent days among Labour colleagues of Angela’s “humble background”.
There was a slight whiff of Dickens’s “ever so ‘umble” Uriah Heep about things when PM Keir Starmer said: “Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly – and I’m proud of her – as our Deputy Prime Minister.”
Science Minister Peter Kyle also defended his colleague, saying: “Just because it is Angela, with her accent and her background, people are treating her in a way they wouldn’t [other people].”
I happen to agree with both men on what they said. But still it jars slightly. Was the subtext that it is OK for “humble” people to screw up on their finances? And does it just reaffirm to the public the distance they believe lies between them and the political class?
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And I wonder how Rayner must feel about such language. Amid the pain of realising her mistake, does she once again feel she is being pointed at as the “humble” outsider – just as she was once pointed at as the poorest of the poor on her estate?
Really it is ourselves we should be pointing at, and wondering how there are still so few people like Rayner at the top of our politics.
The Starmer Cabinet is the most working-class ever. After last July’s election The Sutton Trust found 92 per cent of Cabinet ministers were educated at comprehensive schools. One went to an independent school and one to a grammar, and 40 per cent went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Under Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss just 19 per cent of Cabinet members were former comp kids.
However, while this current Cabinet has been more reflective of the wider country than any that has gone before, beyond it too much of public life remains dominated by those who have been born into money, confidence and an expensive education.
An Institute for Fiscal Studies report in 2023 showed your parents’ income and wealth is of ever-growing importance in determining your own position in lifetime income distribution.
Or as author David Sturrock wrote: “It may be harder now than at any point in over half a century to move up if you are born in a position of disadvantage.”
So don’t hold your breath that there will be many more Angela Rayners coming along any time soon. It will be decades until policies which might achieve that – in education, free school meals, housing and nursery provision – turn the tide.
Angela’s superpower has never been her “humble background”. Yes, that has informed her politics. But her success has been built on an astute mind, the ability to negotiate and to persevere. And, perhaps, too many people underestimating her too.
Alison Phillips is a former editor of the Daily Mirror
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