“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine”. Angela Rayner gives as good as she gets. That was her typically down-to-earth reply to Conservative-inspired challenges to reveal the tax advice she received concerning the sale of a former home.

Ever since she entered politics the deputy leader of the Labour Party has fought to be treated like everyone else rather than be patronised as a working-class woman and sometime teenage mother.

She has become a favourite target for attack by her opponents precisely because she does not share the life story of your typical frontbench politician. No PPE at Oxford University for her, like the shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves; she left school without qualifications to look after her baby, later passing an NVQ to work as a carer.

She evokes condescension from her critics but also, I think, an element of fear that someone like her has risen so far.

Michael Ashcroft, the maverick Tory multi-millionaire and peer, commissions biographies to get even with his chosen subjects. A previous book contained the tale about “Dave” Cameron and a pig’s head. The new book “Red Queen” zeroes in on Rayner, punning on her ginger mane and her politics, which borrows its title from another biography about the late Barbara Castle, another powerful Labour woman.

Ashcroft’s researchers have unearthed that Rayner bought her council house home under right-to-buy. Rather than celebrate the........

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