It is hard to keep up with the tabloids’ rage at Angela Rayner, because it moves so fast. The Daily Mail and the Sun are trying to make the moniker “three pads Rayner” stick, in reference to a property she recently bought in Hove and has made her primary residence. Ostensibly, the reports are asking whether she saved on stamp duty (which Downing Street says she has been unable to comment on due to a court order) – but have been broadened out to question every part of her life and character. This weekend, the Daily Mail was furious one minute that the deputy prime minister spent so much time in Hove, where “residents have seen a lot of her”. The next minute, the Mail on Sunday was livid that she spent so little time there, where neighbours say she “appears to be using it as a holiday home for short breaks because she’s not there very often”. Defying the laws of physics by being in Hove too much and too little, Rayner adds insult to injury by frequenting a town that is home to the ex-wife of Sam Tarry, her partner. Sorry, his title in full: “on-off boyfriend”, despite the fact that they have been together four years. The information that Tarry, co-parent to his children, also lives in Hove may unlock this mystery a tiny bit, but wait, there’s more. Rayner has also been found guilty of going in the sea, wearing a “garishly coloured” Dryrobe (price tag: £165), vaping in a kayak, having friends and drinking wine.
The flat in Hove is, in fact, the only home Rayner owns, her London address being a grace-and-favour apartment attached to her office. And maybe that is Labour hypocrisy all over; you don’t see Reform MPs lousy with official residencies, since they are not in government. She alternates her constituency address in Ashton-under-Lyne with her ex-husband, and her teenage sons live there. That’s divorce for you. As a thought-experiment, go pick over the equity arrangements of any divorced couple you know, and see how fast they tell you to shove it.
It is also a huge problem for the moral majority and its perception of our political overlords that Rayner has been seen eating food; specifically, in a “well-known Italian restaurant”, in pubs at lunchtime, and in a chippie. Sorry to harp on, but again with the questions: where is the right place for her to eat? Those cover pretty much all the price-points of food vending, except for the fortune you would spend at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and can you imagine the hell that would break loose if she ate in one of those? I guess the right thing to do would be for her to get groceries online, though pray God not from Ocado, and then she can eat them in one of those homes she is not allowed to live in.
It doesn’t feel like a million years ago, because it was only one year, that Rayner was considered shady for letting her brother stay with her, despite the fact that he had just returned from a tour in Iraq (had she declared her co-dwellers correctly for council tax purposes?), and absolutely slated, two years before that, for going to Glyndebourne, it being impossible to imagine a genuine working-class person who enjoyed Mozart, and furthermore, deeply concerning as to whose pocket she would end up in as a result. In fact, she was invited by an old friend of hers, a violinist. Those are the ones you have to watch, in the corporate capture of the political establishment – the violinists.
The same year, it was apparently Rayner’s master plan to distract Boris Johnson by sitting opposite him in parliament while having legs, and the year before, she was pilloried for calling the Conservatives “scum”, and when I say “pilloried”, I mean people were, with a straight face, accusing her of dehumanising her political opponents. There is a critical difference between being rude about people with power and deriding the powerless, which I feel sure we all used to understand.
It has never been clearer: this is a class war, mediated through one person. According to the bizarre rules of the rightwing press, she cannot participate in cultural events without betraying her roots, she cannot have a personal life without insinuation, she cannot eat without censure, she cannot engage modestly in the Monopoly game of late capitalism, but you can be sure that if she didn’t, she would be accused of freeloading or chaos. There has been a wall of coverage telling Rayner not to exist. And, way beyond the kinship and admiration of seeing her vaping in the sea, it just makes me glad that she does.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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