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Party insiders reveal Keir Starmer is freezing out his deputy Angela Rayner
ANDREW PIERCE: Once they proudly took the knee together. But now, reveal party insiders, Keir Starmer is freezing his deputy Angela Rayner out of his inner circle
Never one to hide her light under a bushel, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner addressed a major women’s conference in London on Wednesday: ‘I don’t know why we haven’t had a woman leader yet. We will get a woman leader.’
Rayner, who was elected deputy in April 2020 at the same time as Sir Keir Starmer became leader, continued: ‘I will push to make sure there will be a female leader after Keir. That’s what the Labour Party needs. If I think I can do it and I’m the right thing for the country at the time, then yes, you bet I will do it.’
She admitted that her rapid rise up the party’s ranks had surprised her. ‘I never thought I would be chosen by my peers. I never thought I would be deputy leader of the Labour Party,’ she told the gathering, organised by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership.
Yet a few weeks ago, after entering Starmer’s office on the seventh floor of the new party headquarters in Southwark, South London, Rayner could have been forgiven for thinking she no longer was deputy leader.
For Starmer was locked in conversation with senior Labour figures including Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor and former Bank of England economist; Jonathan Reynolds, the Shadow Business Secretary who (unlike Rayner) is a regular on Labour’s TV and radio broadcast round; and Morgan McSweeney, the all-powerful former campaigns director who is now Starmer’s chief of staff.
‘What’s going on? What’s this about?’ asked Rayner, flustered.
There was an embarrassed silence before someone answered. ‘We are having a strategy meeting,’ they told her. At this point the penny dropped.
Rayner, the most senior woman in the Labour Party and its second most powerful elected figure, had not been invited. Not only that, but no one had even told her about it.
To say she was furious is an understatement. Several party officials heard her bitterly complaining about the snub as she stormed out of Starmer’s office.
Though insulting, this type of treatment was hardly unfamiliar for Rayner. Starmer has excluded his deputy from his inner circle and the relationship between the two is increasingly frosty.
‘She is frozen out of all the big decisions and she doesn’t like it,’ said one senior party source. ‘She is not one of his confidantes. Far from it. We are only months away from what could be the last Labour Party conference before the election and she’s not involved in Party strategy. It’s humiliating.’
There have been endless clashes behind the scenes, and some have spilled over into the public domain. Rayner has been particularly unhappy with Starmer’s diktat that frontbench MPs should not go on picket lines during the wave of strikes by state-sector workers.
It is clear the tension has been building for some time. At the last Labour conference Rayner said Labour would overturn the planned 1p cut in income tax proposed by Liz Truss in her mini-budget. Starmer had said the exact opposite.
He had also been enraged at the previous party conference by Rayner’s decision to launch into an emotional diatribe about Boris Johnson and the Tories at a reception. Unfortunately, her loudmouth rant was caught on tape.
‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile . . . banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian . . . piece of scum.’
Even after the remarks were disowned by some of her frontbench colleagues, it took her weeks to apologise.
Starmer and Rayner have been an odd political couple ever since she won the deputy leadership with 53 per cent of the vote — double the total of her closest rival.
While she won the respect of many Labour MPs for her robust performances standing in for Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions, she has infuriated her boss by mocking his own lacklustre outings. In a searing analysis of Starmer’s oratorical skills, Rayner told the BBC programme Newsnight that he needed to ‘put more welly into it’.
‘He takes the emotion out of it,’ she said. ‘I’ll go in with two boots — you know what I mean? Whereas Keir is a bit more sort of: ‘I’ll go in with the strategic case and the detail.’ ‘
There is also tension over Starmer’s five ‘national missions’, which were published in February. They include the much-mocked platitude: ‘Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage.’
When they were revealed at a Shadow Cabinet meeting in Canary Wharf, Rayner was pointedly lukewarm.
‘It’s not just that she thinks they’re wordy and vague, but her nose was out of joint because she’s never in any policy or strategy meetings and wasn’t in the loop when the mission statements were drawn up,’ explained a source.
Yet the rift between the two is not just about policy. It’s as much, if not more, about their characters.
They are chalk and cheese. Starmer, 60, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, a KC who was knighted in 2014, is the darling of the North London metropolitan elite. In 2015 he became MP for Holborn and St Pancras — a short bus ride from the North London constituency of his predecessor Ed Miliband, the architect of Labour’s green policies.
By contrast, Rayner, 43, was brought up on a council estate in Stockport, Greater Manchester, by parents who didn’t work, had her first baby at 16, was a grandmother at 37, and made her mark in politics as a trade union official.
Rayner (Ange to her friends) was in the same 2015 parliamentary intake as Starmer but is brash and impulsive, whereas he is grey and cautious. She emerged unexpectedly strengthened from the botched Shadow Cabinet reshuffle that followed Labour’s defeat to the Tories in the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021.
Initially, Starmer had scapegoated Rayner for the defeat by sacking her as party chairman and national campaign co-ordinator. But Rayner orchestrated a revolt which forced him into an embarrassing U-turn.
Starmer then made her Shadow Secretary of State for the Future of Work, Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Shadow Cabinet Office Minister. Boris Johnson taunted him in the Commons, saying: ‘The more titles he feeds her, the hungrier she is likely to become.’
Yet while they were forced together when Starmer was in political trouble, as his poll ratings have improved the gulf has grown.
In November 2021, emboldened by the shoring up of his own personal position, he humiliated her by announcing details of a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle — at the very moment she was due to make a major speech.
The reshuffle not only overshadowed the well-trailed speech on Tory sleaze but it showed again that she was completely out of the loop.
Afterwards, she admitted to reporters: ‘I don’t know the details of any reshuffle. I’ve been concentrating on the job that I’m doing at hand and I think that’s really important.’
With the party conference coming up in October, Labour will be cranking up its policy programme. Increasingly, Labour frontbenchers are vying for the ear of Starmer.
They are also seeking out Reeves and Wes Streeting — the uber-ambitious Shadow Health Secretary who has just published his autobiography at the age of 40 — for the pair are rarely out of the leader’s office.
Not so Rayner, even though in the Commons they have adjoining rooms. The last official photograph of them together was taken on May 9, after the local elections.
A Labour loyalist insists that this is nothing personal against Rayner.
‘Our private polling shows that we have a real credibility issue on the economy. So on the media we deploy our economic spokesmen like Rachel Reeves. Ange does not have an economic portfolio.’
Which is true — up to a point. Yet there is a personal flashpoint between the leader and his deputy. She is in a relationship with the hard-Left Labour MP Sam Tarry, who used to work for Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader. Tarry was deselected last October by his Ilford South Labour constituency with the implicit blessing of Starmer.
Tarry now faces an uncertain political future. There is speculation in Labour circles that he will be asked by party members in Islington North to throw his hat into the ring for the fight to succeed Corbyn as Labour’s candidate.
One senior Labour MP said: ‘Starmer controls the party machine, which will intervene to impose a shortlist. Tarry will be blocked from it, which puts Rayner on another direct collision course with Starmer. Rayner and Tarry are a serious item. She thinks he’s an asset to Labour.’
In the days when Tony Blair was Opposition leader, he had as his deputy John Prescott, who was also a former trade union official. Rayner once joked she ‘was John Prescott in a skirt’. But she’s not.
In opposition, Blair listened to Prescott and deployed him effectively, making the most of his strengths to deliver landmark changes to policy and the party. Rayner, however, is out on a limb. In reality, the deputy leader is Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
A senior MP said: ‘Rachel and Keir are inseparable. While Rachel was taking about interest rates this week, Angela was wittering on about the fact the next Labour government must appoint a diversity tsar to get more women into parliament. It speaks volumes.’
In their early days they even took a knee for Black Lives Matter. But that would be unlikely to happen today.
When Rayner taunted Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden at Prime Minister’s Questions over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages not being handed to the Covid inquiry, she walked into a trap.
Quick as a flash, Dowden replied: ‘I don’t think we need to search her WhatsApp messages to know that there is no communication between her and the leader of her party!’
Even Labour MPs fell about laughing.
