Her story is certainly impressive. Having grown up on a council estate in Stockport, Greater Manchester, and left school as a pregnant 16-year-old, Angela Rayner rose to become deputy prime minister.
Her career would be remarkable for anyone – but as a woman raised in poverty by an illiterate mother who suffered from bipolar disorder, it is nothing short of astounding.
Ms Rayner’s working-class background is also in stark contrast to those of her many privileged colleagues in Parliament. Aristocrats, millionaires, ex-lawyers: men and women dripping with self-confidence and often cushioned by family money.
This young mother – indeed, a 45-year-old grandmother – who smashed gender and class barriers, should properly be a role model to millions of girls across the country.
And yet the truth is she is nothing but an embarrassment to aspirational working-class women like me. She has let us all down. Instead of treating her position with the dignity it deserves, she has spent her Parliamentary career behaving like an uncouth, haughty, arrogant and deeply unserious hypocrite.
As everyone now knows, Ms Rayner’s political career is in tatters after it emerged that she – not just the Deputy PM but the Housing Minister as well – underpaid some £40,000 in stamp duty on her luxury apartment in Hove, East Sussex, having apparently told tall tales about where she truly lived.
It goes without saying that the glamorous £800,000 pied-a-terre is a world away from the impoverished neighbourhood in which she grew up. Every British family aspires to own their own home, of course: but nobody feels this more keenly than the working class. And if we can buy a property in a more well-to-do area than the one we came from, so much the better.
There was no prouder moment for my parents than when they bought their first home in the late 1970s. My mother had grown up in the grey north London suburb of Harrow – but she had always dreamt of living in leafy Berkshire, in the so-called ‘stockbroker belt’.
Angela Rayner is nothing but an embarrassment to aspirational working-class women like me, writes Katie Hind
Angela Rayner resigned yesterday after admitting she underpaid £40,000 of stamp duty on her new Hove pad
Although, in the end, Mum had to make do with the cheaper Hampshire-Berkshire borders, owning her own property in that clean, safe and beautiful part of the country was a dream come true.
The real working-class culture – not the lazy welfare dependence that so many of Ms Rayner’s colleagues seem to promote – was drilled into me from a young age.
You’ve got to graft, my family said: to buckle down so you can pay your bills and have some self-respect.
There is a deep pride in knowing that every brick in your house, every penny in your bank account, is there thanks to your own hard work – and you must always be honest and proper in your affairs.
Yet Ms Rayner clearly doesn’t see it like that. Instead of just stumping up the tax she owed – especially important in a minister who has spent her career railing against the financial affairs and improprieties of her political enemies – she embarked on complicated schemes to hand over as little as possible. Many questions still surround these murky arrangements.
And the stamp duty scandal is, of course, far from the only scuffle she has found herself in. Last year it emerged that she had taken £3,550 worth of free clothes from Lord Alli, along with many of her Labour colleagues, including of course the freebie-obsessed Keir Starmer, who prefers other men to buy his spectacles for him.
Ms Rayner earns about £160,000 a year with generous expenses, a gold-plated pension and funds galore to run her office: why on earth wouldn’t she pay for her own frocks?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting nice things, of course. When I was 12, I used my paper-round wages to raid the clothes shops on Saturday afternoons. Nothing beat strutting though Crawley’s County Mall clutching my plastic River Island or Bay Trading bag, a new purchase rustling inside. To this day, I often spurn freebies as a journalist for the obvious reason that if you take a ‘gift’ from someone, whether you admit it or not, you owe them. Ms Rayner just doesn’t care.
The working class people I grew up with took pride in their appearance and dressed appropriately. Yet on Tuesday – right in the middle of the scandal she was inflicting on the government – Ms Rayner decided to swan out of her ministerial car into No 10 wearing a pair of garish sunglasses that were a rip-off of Louis Vuitton’s iconic ‘Millionaire’ shades. The message was clear: eff off, you lot!
Would Betty Boothroyd, the daughter of Lancashire textile workers who rose to become the first (and formidable) female Speaker of the Commons, have acted like that?
Not in a million years.
Nor would the late, great Betty ever have been as ill-mannered and tacky as Ms Rayner has shown herself to be.
Don’t get me started on that snap of the tattooed Ms Rayner bobbing in a kayak near her Hove apartment this summer, puffing on a vape and at another point chucking back wine on the beach. What a let-down. What an embarrassment.
I looked at that picture and thought: you’re the Deputy Prime Minister. You owe it to the country and to the voters to treat your role with respect.
My nan worked for years as a conductor on the London buses: she was as working-class as they come. She would always insist that my mum called our neighbours ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ – first names were banned.
Yet ‘respect’ is never the word that comes to mind with Ms Rayner. Take the revealing case in 2015 when she wrote a furious letter on House of Commons paper to a shoe shop after a pair of boots made to look like the Star Wars robot R2-D2 had sold out, and Ms Rayner wrongly believed she was on a pre-order list for them.
‘I have only ever bought your shoes and I am loath to do so again, or recommend your shoes to others,’ she wrote with breathtaking arrogance. ‘I am writing to let you know that treating customers in that way will only cost you more in the long term.’
And lastly, of course, she revealed her true colours during that infamous late-night gathering at the Labour Party conference in 2021, where she ranted that the Tories were ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile… banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum,‘ before adding that she had ‘held back a little’. She was forced to apologise.
I have written before in these pages how grateful I am to Tony Blair’s Labour party for expanding access to university in the late 1990s, giving me the path to higher education that made my career on Fleet Street possible.
What a shame, then, that it’s the private-school-educated lawyer Blair who paved the way for people like me – while Angela Rayner was a disgrace to working class women everywhere and no role model to young girls today.
