Unscripted Angela Rayner takes benefits swipes in her Stride

Times

5 hours ago

As the House of Commons clock made its slow rotation toward noon, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, could be seen hanging around behind the Speaker's chair for several minutes. The prime minister was absent for a second week running, this time at what has been billed as the most important Nato summit since the end of the Cold War, but at which his own very important role has been mainly to answer questions about his own collapsing welfare bill.
Stride's hyper-extended loitering was the first official indication of who would be standing in for Kemi Badenoch this week. But why was he doing it? This isn't how things normally work. Was he waiting to be passed the microphone so he could announce himself over the PA from backstage like a touring standup? Did he perhaps think he couldn't walk in until his entrance music started playing, as is customary in World Wrestling Entertainment? If the shadow chancellor is in need of some entrance music, it has been observed before that TikTok cult classic Break My Stride by the 1980s one-hit wonder Matthew Wilder fits perfectly to the words: 'Ain't nobody gonna back Mel Stride.' Although sadly in the recent leadership election it was also true.
Eventually Stride gave up the wait and strode in, finding his interlocutor Angela Rayner already in place. Awaiting the shadow chancellor was what should have been the very widest of open goals. There's only one subject around in Westminster at the moment, which is, at time of typing, 122 Labour MPs signalling their intent to either amend away or vote down the government's welfare bill next week, principally its £5 billion cuts to disability benefit payments. That is easily enough MPs to destroy or fatally weaken the bill, which would be easily enough to destroy or fatally weaken the government.
'Can she explain,' Stride began, 'why she thinks 122 of her colleagues are wrong and she is right?'
Ah, politics. May it never change. Stride knows what she knows, that actually, she thinks 122 of her MPs are right and that she is wrong, that she's just doing what she's told, but that she can't admit it. It was a clever point at which to make the first incision with the paring knife. The kebabing had begun. But sadly it wasn't that easy, because the Conservatives support the cuts. If it destroys the government, it will have to do so almost without their assistance.
She didn't know why she was right and they were wrong. Who would, in the circumstances, when politics has compelled you to disagree with yourself? But Stride did extract from Rayner a clear promise. There had been rumours, impeccably sourced, that the vote on the bill next Tuesday could be scrapped altogether, but not any more. They'd never get away with it.
Rayner leant across the dispatch box as she did it, in the style of Prince Naseem Hamed presenting his chin to an inferior opponent, daring them to take a swing. 'I don't know if he sort of listened to the previous answer, or if he was just reading his script,' she said. 'I don't need a script. We will go ahead on Tuesday.'
So that's that then. It will have to go ahead now. What happens when it does is anyone's guess. The rebels won't be bought off, and there are enough of them to defeat the bill with dozens to spare. Starmer and Reeves's tediously repeated mantra about taking ' tough decisions ' will be all but destroyed. You can't take tough decisions if your party won't let you.
Rayner was right when she said she doesn't need a script. The script is her enemy. She is a natural freewheeler. One Labour MP was told he spoke 'with great authenticity' on some subject or other, while she struggled to look both at him, and her notes at the same time. Toward the end, one of the Tory newbies, a youngish purple-ish sort called Andrew Snowden, asked a question that had the air of a solid week's practice in front of the bathroom mirror. Who would she most like to sack from the cabinet? The chancellor for this? The foreign secretary for that? The home secretary for the other? He sat down thrilled with himself. 'Maybe he'd like to have a go next week?' he was told. It was as deliciously patronising as it gets. Sadly for Snowden, he knew it had worked.
Still, we shall have to hope that some of it was scripted, specifically the bit she said hadn't been. Her adamant insistence that next week's vote is going ahead has not quietened all of the noise that says it won't. She must, she hopes, have known what she was doing. One makes political predictions at one's peril, but I suspect that that look of unshakeable certainty may not prove to be quite all it seemed.