Laura Kuenssberg: Are Angela Rayner's troubles a sign of what's to come for Labour?

Image source, PA Media

By Laura Kuenssberg

Presenter, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg

“Everyone says they want to have a woman around who drinks and smokes and makes jokes.

“Then they get a woman who drinks and smokes and makes jokes, then they say, ‘oh, we didn’t mean quite like that'”.

As a source who knows Angela Rayner well suggests, the great and good of Westminster don’t always know what to do with Labour’s second-in-command.

She has made her own way, going from care worker, to union official, to being on track to be the deputy prime minister by the end of the year.

One of her colleagues says “she is one of the cleverest people I have ever met”.

She makes no secret of enjoying a night out, boasting once of going out from 4pm until 6am, rather than courting vanilla public virtue with choreographed campaigning snaps.

And she brands herself “John Prescott in a skirt,” in reference to Tony Blair’s outspoken deputy who held high office for years but was famous for sometimes mixing his words up, and for punching a protestor.

Ms Rayner has what pundits pompously call “cut through” – in other words, she gets noticed.

She has legions of fans in her party and, pollsters suggest, among many voters, especially in seats Labour lost at the 2019 general election.

That makes her an asset to Sir Keir Starmer.

But as the past few weeks have categorically shown, it also means she is a target.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of what she did when she sold her house many years ago, with the police investigating, Angela Rayner is in trouble.

And the way this saga unfolds has lessons Labour can’t ignore.

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She has been accused of not telling the whole truth to the taxman years ago about where she was living.

After weeks of claims she is now being investigated by Greater Manchester Police over the sale of her council house, accused of breaking electoral law by giving false information about what was her main home.

She has said time and again that she did nothing wrong.

But she has so far refused to publish the tax advice that she recently sought. You can read more about the accusations here.

Image source, Getty Images

It is obviously a problem for someone hoping for high office to be under the police microscope, although some of her colleagues and party insiders are trying desperately to see the positive.

One shadow cabinet minister told me: “I hope and believe it’s an opportunity for her to draw a line under it all.”

But there’s an immediate political problem, before the investigation concludes.

When Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were being investigated by police over Partygate, Rayner herself suggested they should stand down just because of that.

Then when she and Keir Starmer were investigated themselves by the police over what became known as “Beergate”, when they had a takeaway with staffers during lockdown, they both suggested they would stand down if they were found to have done anything wrong.

Just in time for the evening news bulletins, Rayner promised she would quit if found guilty of any crime.

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One shadow cabinet source told me before she and Starmer made this same high stakes vow during “Beergate” that they had taken three separate pieces of legal advice to be totally confident they would not have to step down in disgrace.

It’s not clear if the party has been through the same process this time.

It is not a commitment Ms Rayner will have given lightly but for as long as the Greater Manchester Police investigation goes on, her political spikes are blunted.

She has often made hay by attacking the Tories’ with allegations of sleaze, corruption or dodgy dealings.

Now her behaviour is being studied by the police that’s impossible, at least for now.

Image source, Getty Images

One Labour insider suggests “the reason this is particularly damaging for her is that she looks like a hypocrite – being a woman of the people who has come from nowhere was so valuable to her political brand – now she can’t be the attack dog on ethics and standards”.

A senior Labour MP says “the danger with this is that it makes us politicians look the same”.

Ms Rayner’s friends highlight that you can see from space that this story is following a well-established Conservative playbook.

A shadow minister says it’s “Durham deja vu,” a reference to that “Beergate” investigation.

“Beergate” was an attempt to give the impression Labour had been up to the same kind of thing as staffers at parties under Boris Johnson’s roof at Number 10.

This story certainly does follow a similar pattern.

Find a potential flaw, even if it might be very minor. Ask questions. Ask more questions. Call for investigations. Call more loudly for investigations. Keep going and going and going, even if there have been repeated denials of anything that was wrong..

Some of Ms Rayner’s allies say they feel “desperately sorry” for her.

Another shadow cabinet colleague believes the public are on side, telling me “I keep having people come up to me and saying they are appalled by how she is being treated, and think it’s really off”.

Yet the police decision to get involved undermines the suggestion it’s all a Tory confection.

Greater Manchester Police aren’t exactly a bunch of pussycats.

And as well as the specific problem of investigation itself, questions are being raised about the Labour leadership’s handling of the saga.

There are those who wish she had confronted the claims earlier and more directly, perhaps publishing her tax advice.

One source told me: “You have to find a way of killing it when a story has rumbled on for so long.”

Another suggests a “blind spot”, saying Ms Rayner gets angry that she is treated differently by parts of the press, but that, perhaps understandable, irritation can cloud her judgement.

They compared this row to when she was under attack for attempting to buy pricey Apple products on her expenses, telling me, “it’s not a conspiracy… if you are talking about child poverty and foodbanks and zero hours contracts and you are talking about engraved airpods that reduces your political capital”.

Another source says this saga will have made her at her most “pugnacious and fighty”.

The Conservatives will be pleased already at how long they have managed to keep this row going, with parts of the press hungry for more.

And they reckon they have been able to make the most of vulnerabilities in Starmer’s operation.

A senior Tory told me when the claims about Ms Rayner first emerged in a book, it “should have set alarm bells ringing straight away in Labour HQ – it was clearly something which needed explaining”.

In the heat of a campaign, you need to be swift and decisive when stories like this emerge, the source added, and “hoping things will just go away” is rarely a good idea.

“The press can be incredibly persistent and being evasive just increases this.”

Conservatives are privately happy to crow at how they have managed to keep the story in the public eye.

And what they see as success so far of course means they are highly likely to use these tactics again.

A Labour source says: “They have a campaign template now – this is how they do it – they use it to effect.”

The source says they hope “it doesn’t change the fundamentals, but it’s a distraction in Westminster”, which takes up political space that Labour can’t use for other things.

On Friday for example, Keir Starmer’s important morning statements about the use of nuclear weapons were sidetracked by headlines about the Greater Manchester Police investigation.

But Ms Rayner and the rest of the Labour Party might have to confront the fact this is likely to happen again.

Whether the Tories were catastrophically behind in the polls or not, it is highly likely that as the election nears, they will try to dig out more and more dirt on high profile Labour politicians, as one shadow ministers says, “there will be stuff dug out about all of us”.

Whatever the outcome of this particular saga, Labour might have to prepare for more attacks to come.

What is interesting about this whole mess is that it does not seem to have reignited tensions between Rayner and Starmer.

A few years back there was deep unhappiness, competition between their teams, complaints that she was being frozen out, and that she never much got on with the “blue suits” around the leader.

Although recently she branded him the “least political person” she knows, the pressure that’s coming to bear on her does not seem to be putting, at least in public, strain on their working relationship.

Fans of hers sometimes whisper that’s because she has been willing to “suck it up”.

She has her own mandate, elected by Labour members as deputy leader, but has over time, sources suggest, been more willing to take Starmer’s lead.

Multiple colleagues of them both say they have found a better way of working with each other after their early spats.

Whether you think the whole saga is a desperately unfair attack on a female politician who dares not to fit the normal mould, or that her behaviour doesn’t seem quite right, it is Friday’s decision by the police to look again at the claims that means it persists.

And until that investigation is complete there will be no relief for Ms Rayner even if, as she is absolutely adamant, she did nothing wrong.

More broadly, shadow ministers say Labour “has to keep its eye on the prize”, concentrating on bigger issues.

They hope that she is found swiftly to have done nothing wrong, but if the investigation does find mistakes, hope “it blows up in her face, not the party’s.”

But in politics, of course, timing can be everything.

This story is more than a little local difficulty at this time.

There are local elections in just over two weeks. Every day takes us a step closer to the general election. Every political moment is part of the long campaign being fought.

One Labour source says there is no evidence “this is moving any votes”.

And there is no sense yet this affair is causing panic in the party.

But it is an obvious example of the kind of attacks Labour needs to be prepared for, that even with its huge polling lead, could distract and deter the party in the months ahead.

Whatever Angela Rayner did or didn’t do when her name was nowhere in the political landscape, the intensity of the scrutiny of Labour and its politicians is only going to grow.

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