‘I’m a girl from a council estate and I’ve had to prove my worth.’ Angela Rayner back in the driving seat for Labour

As the Labour Party marches relentlessly on the road towards power, one of its most potent electoral weapons is on an 8,000km-tour of Britain in a battle bus. Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, seems destined to become Britain’s deputy prime minister in just over three weeks.

Whereas party leader Keir Starmer is routinely – and, his allies insist, unfairly – portrayed as a technocratic bore, the working-class Mancunian Rayner is viewed as more of a technicolour draw. Brassy, sassy and funny, she has always cut a striking figure striding the corridors of Westminster.

Rayner’s well known backstory – pregnant at 16, a grandmother at 37 – gives the now 44-year-old former trade union official a certain grit that is rarely found on the green benches of the House of Commons. Relentlessly scrutinised over everything from her self-described “boob job” to her accent, she routinely brushes it all off before going on the attack against the Tories.

“I’m not a guy from Eton in a smart suit,” she said this week on the News Agents podcast. “I’m a girl from a council estate and I’ve had to prove my worth. And that’s okay. I don’t mind proving it.”

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Yet for the first week of the election campaign that kicked off on May 22nd, the normally ebullient Rayner was uncharacteristically subdued. She was weighed down by an official inquiry into her tax affairs and her past living arrangements, and was absent from the campaign trail.

Rayner insisted all along she did nothing wrong. She repeatedly claimed the allegations that she had wrongly avoided tax on a house sale by misstating where she primarily lived was a “Tory smear”. She was confident she would be found to have acted properly.

But despite the veneer of defiance the strain on Rayner was obvious. In mid-March she attended a lunch in Westminster with a group of journalists who grilled her about her past living arrangements with her children and former husband. Where did you usually sleep at night, Angela? She looked and sounded humiliated by the intrusion and seemed close to tears at the lunch.

The following month it got even worse for her when police announced they would investigate certain aspects of the allegations against her following public pressure from her political rivals. For weeks she seemed blunted in the Commons chamber as she faced relentless Tory taunts across the dais.

Then on May 28th, seven days into the snap election campaign, the police publicly announced that Rayner was in the clear. It is understood tax authorities gave her the same verdict privately. Like a balloon reinflating, Rayner retook her old shape in an instant.

She has dismissed the allegations against her as being spiked with “misogyny and classism”. Labour’s most flamboyant frontbencher, now unburdened, appears firmly back on the front foot.

Last week she hit the road in Labour’s battle bus for an odyssey through what Labour now perceives to be battleground constituencies. The places she has picked are quite telling in their demonstration of the confidence coursing through the party, which is more than 20 points ahead in the polls.

This week, for example, Rayner was in Macclesfield, which has been a Tory safe seat for over 100 years. It has never voted Labour, yet Rayner insisted such seats were now in play. If Labour wins seats like Macclesfield the Tories will be in deep trouble.

Yet as she travels the byroads of Britain Rayner’s most important campaigning in the weeks ahead may be done a little closer to home. She faces an awkward challenge in her Greater Manchester constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, where she had a majority of about 4,300 votes in 2019.

George Galloway, the leader of the Workers Party of Britain and sworn enemy of Labour, has targeted her seat in the election. It has a sizeable proportion of Muslim voters who are angry at Labour over Starmer’s handling of the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza. Rayner would be a fine scalp for Galloway.

Last week he told The Irish Times that his party had “at least 10,000 votes in Ashton”, where it is running an impressive candidate in Aroma Hassan. This could make Rayner’s re-election a bit more uncomfortable than she would like it to be.

However, Rayner’s path to victory might be smoothed not be her friends on the left but by her enemies on the right. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK candidate Robert Barrowcliffe may shave enough off the Tory vote in Ashton to prevent it capitalising on the damage done by Galloway’s party to Rayner.

As her foes have found out it isn’t easy to knock Labour’s pugnacious deputy leader out of the ring.