The handwritten letter was a decent touch. The prime minister has the spiky handwriting of someone who has spent his life on a keyboard, which made the gesture of using an actual pen for his letter to Angela Rayner accepting her triple resignation all the more meaningful.
“You have been a trusted colleague and a true friend for many years,” Sir Keir Starmer wrote, glossing over that time he tried to demote her for daring to plot against him, only for her to emerge with more titles than the local library.
But Starmer’s distress was authentic, in that he has lost someone he has learned to value, and who was an important and complementary part of his government. He needed someone with her instinctive political skills, for example, to defuse the Labour MPs’ rebellion over disability benefits.
He will be even more upset, though, that his holier-than-thou pitch against the slipshod morals of the last Conservative government has just gone up in smoke. He was the lawman – the former Director of Public Prosecutions, the principled politician who said he would resign if he was found to have broken lockdown laws. His government was going to be better than theirs, and now it has turned out to be roughly the same – only worse because it claimed to be ethically superior.
One brave government source tried to channel Monty Python by looking on the bright side. “There are no disasters, only opportunities,” someone told Aubrey Allegretti of The Times, quoting Boris Johnson. And for some Labour MPs, their mourning for a fallen comrade will be cut short by the joy of ministerial promotion in the reshuffle that follows.
But for the prime minister, this is a barely mitigated disaster. You need only observe that Nigel Farage brought his big conference speech forward by four hours so that he could crow with immediate effect to know that. The damage done to the government’s reputation by the perception that Labour and the Tories are “all the same” is hard to measure – until we see the opinion polls showing Reform stretching its lead. The Labour–Tory “uniparty” is a Reform meme on social media, and Rayner just made it real.
Her departure complicates the Budget, because Rachel Reeves desperately needs someone like Rayner to help sell the unsaleable to Labour MPs. The chancellor (and the rest of us) may breathe a private sigh of relief that she will be able to kick most of the measures in Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill into the even longer grass, but she and Starmer urgently need some “left-wing” cover for the tough decisions they are going to have to take.
Which is why Rayner’s resignation as deputy leader of the party is a needless disaster piled upon an unavoidable one. As I said when I explained why Rayner would not be so destructive as to trigger an election, it will tip the party into a civil war. At a time when the mood of party members is anti-Starmer, this is a contest that will be won by the candidate who comes across as most “left wing”, with “left” for these purposes being defined as being against the leader and for nationalising things, increasing public spending and taxing the rich (even more).
Candidates have to be nominated by 20 per cent of MPs – that is, 80 – with supporting nominations from local parties or trade unions. And my guess is that the most “left-wing” candidate who can clear that hurdle will be chosen in the one-member-one-vote election by party members. So, bad luck, Shabana Mahmood, Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting. Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, and Clive Lewis, a member of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group, have a head start.
The deputy leader does not have to have a ministerial post, so they need not have much power, but the campaign to elect them is likely to present the public with the spectacle of a party divided against itself.
Rayner’s departure from the government is a disaster, with the disaster of her departure from the Labour deputy leadership piled on top. No wonder Starmer’s gracious handwritten letter failed to offer one thing that similar letters often mention at the end: the prospect of a return to government at a later date. The subtext: Goodbye, Angela, and thanks for nothing.
