Labour is ready for a female leader, Angela Rayner has said, as she revealed she was “doing the groundwork now” to ensure the party’s next chief was a woman. The deputy leader, speaking to Times Radio, said she would “certainly be pushing” for Sir Keir Starmer’s successor to be a woman.
But she joked that at the moment she was “happy with Keir because I get to be the woman in charge”. Speaking ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday, Ms Rayner gave her views on feminism, the difficulties of being a woman in politics, and on the arguments on trans rights on the left.
“There’s different brands or different shades of feminism, and people wear their feminism in the way that it works for them,” she said, warning that “sometimes the language and the tone of feminism puts people off”. But she said: “My friends who are, you know, holding down two jobs, got seven kids, looking after the grandkids and everything else, they are just as much of a feminist as I am, but they would not recognise it in that way.”
