Listening to Angela Rayner this week has felt like real-time evidence for Karl Marx’s quip about the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Even before she had addressed the TUC conference, Rayner was fending off questions about whether she was a modern-day John Prescott or, as she preferred, Barbara Castle. And long before this week’s comparisons to Prescott and Castle, John McDonnell was hailing her as the “Nye Bevan of the Jeremy Corbyn government”.
For Marx, of course, the point was that such historical cosplay was just that, a distraction, covering up the reality of grinding historical change — of new worlds coming into being, not old ones being resurrected. With Rayner, though, the historical comparisons themselves are revelatory.
When she described herself as “Prescott in a skirt”, for example, it was an attempt to showcase her loyalty. When she recently said she prefers to think of herself as a Barbara Castle, it was an attempt to showcase her independence. And when McDonnell hailed her as a new Bevan, it was not simply a way of paying her a compliment, but to stake a claim over her, declaring her as a figure of the Left at the very time many on the Right were beginning to think she might in fact be one of theirs.
Back in 2017, it did not seem so ludicrous that Rayner might actually prove to be a kind of stealth member of the Labour right. This, after all, had long been the traditional role played by the trades unions in the Labour movement — a pragmatic check on both the wishy-washy Fabianism of the soft Left and the radicals on the hard Left (and, indeed, the Blairite Right). The old Right is the tradition that gave us Ernest Bevin and James Callaghan: hard, patriotic deal makers who got things done and were uninterested in ideological purity contests. As one Labour shadow cabinet member put it to me, this is also Rayner’s self-image: the union organiser who cares little about indulgent Left-wing manoeuvring.
I distinctly remember the moment the Labour Right was most excited about Rayner — in large part because I, too, had convinced myself that there was something in this idea. I had seen her in the little-used “Barry Room”, tucked away in a quiet bit of the House of Lords, dining with one of Tony Blair’s closest allies — Lord Levy, then known as “Lord Cashpoint” for his success at raising donations for the party. Had the Blairites seen something, I wondered, and were they courting her, looking for ways to support her as their last best hope against the Left?
The little lunch meeting I witnessed came around the time Rayner had gone into battle with McDonnell over the issue of scrapping tuition fees. According to reports, Rayner — then shadow education secretary — was dismayed by the party’s decision to prioritise such an expensive policy choice over spending more on the kind of early-years care that she had once depended upon. Scrapping tuition fees largely helped middle-class children, while funding Sure Start centres helped the poor. At the time, Rayner even had the bravery to praise Tony Blair. As she said: “Ideology never put food on my table… I talk about Tony Blair’s tenure because it changed my life.”
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