“John Prescott in a skirt.” That’s Angela Rayner’s well-practised line to describe her relationship with Sir Keir Starmer. The words are carefully chosen, intended to remind people of Tony Blair’s long-serving deputy, a word-mangling former trade unionist whose loyalty to Blair underpinned the New Labour project for more than a decade.
But Rayner isn’t Starmer’s Prescott. Her relationship with her leader is fated to be much more complicated. Prescott is 15 years older than Blair and abandoned any hope of leading Labour when the younger man beat him to the top job in 1994. Angela Rayner is 43, some 17 years younger than Starmer. Prescott saw his role as deputy leader and deputy prime minister as the end of his career. No one at Westminster thinks that this is Rayner’s last job.
