A government that was already reeling has sustained another massive blow. Elected in a landslide slightly more than a year ago, Labour hit the midterm blues within a few months, currently has the poll numbers of an administration in its dying days – and has now witnessed a scandal and resignation close to the apex of power.
Perhaps the many New Labour veterans now installed in Downing Street will be reassuring Keir Starmer that the storm of Angela Rayner’s departure will pass, reminding him that the Blair cabinet saw the exit of one Peter Mandelson – also over his homeowning arrangements, as it happens – similarly early in the first term, but paid no electoral price. And yet, the prime minister has only to look at the economic numbers and his own popularity ratings to know that this is not 1998 and he is no Tony Blair.
Accordingly, Rayner’s decision to quit as both deputy PM and deputy leader of the Labour party will hit hard, further wounding a government that has been struggling since almost the moment it took office.
At its most basic, a resignation always damages an administration’s reputation for competence. It allows opponents to charge, and voters to fear, that things are unravelling, that at the top there is chaos rather than order. No 10 will hope that the Friday afternoon reshuffle – with David Lammy succeeding Rayner as deputy PM and Yvette Cooper replacing him as foreign secretary – will look decisive and even be rejuvenating. But personnel changes forced by scandal hardly fit the image of a prime minister whose main offer to the country was technocratic calm, as an antidote to the Tory dysfunction embodied by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
The specific circumstances that led Rayner to quit make things worse. They recall the headlines that dogged Labour from the start, when senior ministers – including Starmer – were having to explain why they had taken free stuff, from natty clothes to tickets to see Taylor Swift. Again, those revelations undermined Labour’s promise to clean the Westminster stables of the sleaze that had malodorously piled up in the Johnson era.
There will be plenty ready to argue that there is a world of difference between Rayner’s actions and those that shook the last government, but it will do little good. A senior minister paying £40,000 less tax than they should have will strike too many voters as proof of what the cynics always, and untruthfully, say – that every last politician is either a hypocrite or more concerned with lining their own pockets than serving the public good.
That line of attack damages all politicians, but it hurts this government especially. Starmer does not have oratorical gifts or charisma; for a long time, his defining feature was a kind of boy-scout image of probity. As a former chief prosecutor, he cast himself as the un-Boris: the unexciting goody-goody who would ensure that the rules were obeyed. Any rule-breaking on his watch breaks that perception – bad news when that perception is pretty much all he’s got.
Still, that is to map only some of the crater that has been left in the Labour landscape by this bombshell. The gap left by Rayner’s resignation is deeper because of who she is and what her elevation in the party meant.
Famously, John Prescott played a very particular role for Blair, acting as an emissary to an often suspicious party, a character witness vouching for his boss to traditional, working-class supporters especially. (As vice-president, Joe Biden performed a similar role for Barack Obama.) By rights, Starmer should not have needed such a lieutenant: the son of a toolmaker is from a working-class background himself. But, for whatever reason, the PM does not present that way. Much of contemporary politics is about vibes, and Sir Keir has a vibe that does not match his backstory.
Rayner, whose life experience makes her a rarity among practitioners of Westminster politics, filled that space. You’d speak to Labour canvassers awed by her ability to connect with voters on the doorstep, working-class women especially. One told me how Rayner confessed to a woman that the paving stones of her garden path were cleaner than the tiles in Rayner’s kitchen: the voter beamed. Moderators of focus groups noted how voters warmed to Rayner for being herself. To them, Rayner had that most precious commodity in politics: authenticity.
But this was about more than mere presentation. How many national politicians could speak of the girls who fell victim to grooming gangs and credibly say: “That could have been me”? For some in Labour, Rayner embodied the party’s ideal, even its promise, on social mobility: to nurture a country where “someone like Angela Rayner can become deputy prime minister, where we have a talent pool broader and deeper than Eton College,” as one colleague puts it. Others in Labour are convinced that the long-running and relentless scrutiny by the rightwing newspapers of the deputy PM proves that there are some who, with equal passion, don’t want to live in a country where “someone like Angela Rayner can become deputy prime minister”.
So a cabinet light on gifted communicators and a government short of politicians capable of speaking to Labour’s historic constituency has lost someone who is both. That leaves a large vacancy to fill.
Or rather two. Starmer can reshuffle his cabinet, but the post of deputy leader is decided by party members. Unless Starmer moves to cancel it – or unless Lammy’s appointment effectively forestalls a contest, by paving the way for the latter to run unopposed – that means an internal election at a moment of vulnerability for the leadership. An argument over the party’s direction that has been rumbling inside Labour for months will now burst into the open, given the focus and sharpness that can only come in a choice between individuals.
Should Labour continue to chase the so-called hero voters of the pro-Brexit red wall cherished by the Downing Street chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, fighting Reform UK – which gathers for its party conference this weekend buoyed by polls showing it on course to be the largest party at the next general election – on the turf of immigration and the like? Or should it look to its left, staunching the flow of onetime Labour supporters now defecting to the Greens, the new, unnamed party of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana or assorted independents? This is a debate that Starmer has so far been able to keep the lid on. Rayner has just blown it right off.
Blair withstood that first Mandelson exit in part because the government and the economy were riding high. But it was also because Mandelson’s communications skills were not indispensable. The PM himself was no slouch in that department and, more importantly, the entire government knew what story it was telling. If Rayner’s resignation inflicts much greater damage, that’s not wholly down to either her biography or her ability to speak human. It’s because this government is not telling a story compelling enough to transcend the inevitable bumps and skids that happen to every administration.
This autumn there will be two opportunities to address that, in the form of the Labour party conference and the budget, now set for 26 November. If Starmer and his ministers do not seize both of them, then that will be a failure more culpable than any underpayment of stamp duty – and its consequences will be far more grave.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. His new non-fiction book, The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them (£25), is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £22.50
