The fight between Rayner and Reeves will destroy Labour

Telegraph

23-05-2025

In the autumn of 2021 Angela Rayner made the kind of headlines that politicians would generally rather avoid. At a fringe event at Labour's annual conference she blasted the Conservatives as 'a bunch of scum' and described then Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a 'racist, homophobic misogynist'.
After the usual media hullabaloo, Keir Starmer's deputy issued an apology and the whole thing gradually faded from public memory, along with the response from ordinary Labour Party members at the time.
For Rayner was not castigated by her own side; she was not condemned by Labour activists. This despite the fact the House of Commons, just a few weeks later, would gaslight the entire country into believing that harsh and impolite language in politics was somehow a contributing factor in the brutal slaying of Conservative MP David Amess in October that year.
In fact, Amess was murdered by an Islamist jihadist, but MPs found it far more comfortable to pretend that using kinder language about their opponents on Twitter might help prevent further such atrocities.
A belated reversion to a more polite political intercourse notwithstanding, it was informative to read some of the immediate responses to Rayner's late-night invective before an audience of cheering comrades.
Most of them were delighted that she had merely said what they had always thought, with some even suggesting that the word 'scum' was too polite a term for Conservatives.
Many of these respondents were likely the kind of people who bought and wore tee-shirts featuring the phrases 'Lower than vermin' (a term coined by former Health Secretary Nye Bevan to describe Tories) and 'Never kissed a Tory'.
In that brief glimpse of the real nature of a certain section of the Labour membership, we could glimpse Rayner's appeal to the party and the reason she remains a formidable force in Keir Starmer's Government. Relations between the two have often been strained, not least when it was briefed that Starmer, in opposition, planned to divest her of any influential position around the shadow cabinet table, only for her to emerge from the reshuffle with more titles than Muhammad Ali.
But as well as being seen as a doughty class warrior with a healthy (though now less frequently expressed) contempt for the Conservative Party, she has proved herself one of the more effective ministers in this Government, earning the approval of some internal critics who contrast her ability to deliver with the apparent flailing of some of her colleagues, even more experienced ones. She has earned the initials 'GWJ' from at least one approving veteran Labour politician – shorthand for Getting on With the Job.
So when tensions between Rayner and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, arise, as they did this week with the leaking of a memo written by Rayner that advocated a series of tax rises that the Deputy Prime Minister believes will offset the need for at least some planned budget cuts to Whitehall departments, it's a safe bet that a significant portion of the party grass-roots will be rooting for the Deputy Leader they elected back in 2020.
If all of this sounds as if Rayner is planning some sort of leadership challenge to Starmer himself, you might be getting a bit ahead of yourself. But not by much. Rumours in Westminster suggest Rayner has no intention of allowing either Wes Streeting or Reeves herself to be crowned as replacements for Starmer should he decide to chuck in the towel before the next election.
Her memo, advocating various tax rises on the very people that Labour activists despise most – wealth creators and savers – will stand her in good stead whenever the starting gun is fired.
Before that, the memo and its author highlight the two opposing philosophies that are fighting it out for supremacy in the government. Back bench nerves have been brought close to breaking point by the continuing negative public reaction to policy announcements such as the restrictions on the winter fuel allowance and benefit cuts, as well as the refusal, so far, to scrap the Conservatives' two-child limit on benefit claimants.
Even Starmer's clumsy attempt this week to reverse ferret on the winter fuel allowance has not gone down well, sparking fears among Labour MPs that further such U-turns, if they are handled as badly, could do more harm than good to the party's reputation for economic mismanagement.
Meanwhile, Reeves's carefully constructed strategy, aimed at reassuring the country and the markets that Labour is a responsible steward of the nation's finances, is being directly challenged by Rayner, who has the support of the party and the respect of colleagues in her attempt to revert to a more traditional pre-Tony Blair Labour tax-and-spend agenda.
Labour has always struggled to reconcile, in Government, the demands of Left-wing activists and the responsibilities of being the holder of the public purse: less than a year into this administration's life, the unity of the Government in the face of unanticipated pressures could yet be destroyed by the wildly contradictory political and economic philosophies of its central players.