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“It was too much. I couldn’t bear it,” harrumphed a male editor as we picked over a punnet of strawberries at Wimbledon last week. What had so provoked his irritation? He had watched Angela Rayner, the UK’s deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, walk into Downing Street in a “ghastly” mint green suit.
Rayner, a 44-year-old grandmother from Stockport, is no ordinary MP. And her attire for her first public outing in leadership made for a typically flamboyant show. Critics quickly noted that the suit — with its wide-leg trousers and cropped jacket — was from Me+Em and cost £550. (Its founder Clare Hornby is apparently popular among Labour women because she is married to Johnny Hornby, former managing director of the advertising company that managed Tony Blair’s 2001 campaign.) The ensemble was set off with a pair of matching shoes. It was a bold choice, but I thought the Muppet-y ensemble made for a refreshing change from the ubiquitous red jacket so commonly adopted by female politicians trying to telegraph their brand of femininity and power.
Before you all pile in with Rayner’s credentials, and why we should judge her on her merits and not her clothes, may I direct you to the news pages, because that’s not what I want to do. For those still labouring under the delusion that people only want to discuss politicians via their politics, I present you with this fact: the single most discussed feature of the UK election was Rishi Sunak failing to carry an umbrella while standing in the rain.
Clothes unveil the human — they are the language through which we express our personality. And those sartorial choices are still weaponised against people in power, especially women. Ernie Warrender, formerly of the UK Independence party, was the most prominent to have a crack. “Potentially your future Prime Minister,” he sneered of Rayner on X. “Does this really represent the UK?”
Rayner isn’t everybody’s notion of a cabinet minister. Her persona is, as one former boss of mine would say, “strong meat”. My favourite memes are those comparing Keir Starmer’s right-hand woman to the 10th Doctor’s assistant Donna Noble, who was played by Catherine Tate. What I found so charmingly naive about Warrender’s post, however, was how precisely the minister does represent most Brits. As Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservative party, observed on the podcast Electoral Dysfunction: the UK is far more used to seeing normal folk like Rayner than the Tristans with their “tasselly loafers [and] pinky rings” that the Tory party thought would represent the nation’s needs.
By contrast, Rayner recalls every other sleep-deprived mother (or, like her, grandmother) trying to rouse some action on the PTA: her bronze eye shadow might be brassy, and her wacky lipstick smudgy, but by God she’ll have you volunteering for a shift on that tombola at the school fete next weekend.
Rayner, who grew up on a council estate, has a working-class narrative that few could overcome. Her ascent from care worker through to union representative, all the while looking after a bipolar mother, is astonishing, especially when considering that she had her first son when she was 16. She has a “potty mouth”, has described herself as “John Prescott in a skirt” and has had “big blowouts” with the now PM.
She is not a demure politician in the school of Starmer or new chancellor Rachel Reeves. Among the many fabulous details to have emerged about her are that she has reportedly toned down her sartorial preferences for leopard print and glitter because such choices “irritated” Starmer, borrowed £5,600 for a boob job because her breasts looked like “basset hound ears”, and gets an average of three to four hours sleep a night.
Rayner is a welcome dose of human in a cabinet of ruthlessly uptight. She revels in her reputation as noisy, northern and a bit chaotic, where Starmer has gone to an indefatigable effort to obscure his, actually quite interesting, suburban past. A video surfacing in recent months finds the prime minister in his early career as a young barrister discussing human rights. It’s notable primarily for his astonishing likeness to Mark Darcy (of Bridget Jones fame), but secondly for his voice. Somewhere between the Inns of Court and Westminster, Starmer has transformed: he’s been straitened into starched-white shirts, become more sincere and taken the glottal stop that marked his youth and shoved it up his nose.
Nevertheless, when I look around the cabinet, I see much that represents. Rachel Reeves grew up in Lewisham, which is practically Croydon, went to a local comprehensive and has the same adenoidal drone as that adopted by her boss. Rayner may be the most extreme exponent of working-class representation, but this new cabinet is a complete sea change from the Etonian cabal we’ve seen in power for the past 14 years. It’s clambering, aspirant, ambitious and, sometimes, it looks a mess. But I way prefer the glitter to yet another pinky ring.
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