Angela Rayner sees herself as the UK’s answer to JD Vance |
Angela Rayner is launching a podcast, Beyond the Bubble, which is already a very Angela-shaped contradiction, because the protagonist’s mission is really to get back inside the bubble of Labour’s crisis-prone top-tier as soon as possible.
The former deputy prime minister and Housing Secretary came a cropper over careless handling of her stamp duty allowances and had to be bounced out of the Cabinet last September to spend more time with her HMRC returns.
Nonetheless, she remains as ambitious as she is stubborn. And in a world where the present idea of “new media” produces a flurry of digital videos of ministers trying effortfully to look natural, Rayner is a rare figure who relished an audience and taking risks to keep her profile high.
Launching a podcast with the first episode with Lord (Michael) Gove, the former serial Tory minister who also had leadership ambitions and is now The Spectator editor, is fun from a fellow podcaster’s point of view. These two are similarly “out there”, with a history of late nights and dance-floor antics. Both are natural communicators, but beneath the easy veneer, they are both tribal people with asmall, trusted circle of intimates.
They both know housing policy well, though not many Labour MPs reckon Ange has gone to the trouble launching a pilot podcast with the view of discussing the finer disagreements about the road-use impacts of, say, the housing plan for Canterbury.
In the same way, Rayner used a guest appearance with a banking group to criticism the impact of the Office of Budget Responsibility. It was a barely coded critique from the “soft left” of why on earth the Treasury and its affiliates stop Labour from........