First get all your ducks in a row. For much of the last three years you couldn’t miss the tension at the top of the Labour party. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner made an uneasy couple as leader and deputy. They smiled for the cameras and more or less held things together in public, but behind the scenes neither really trusted one another. If they stopped short of openly trashing each other, then they happily damned with faint praise. Even if Labour were to win the next election, few gave the relationship a long-term future. They needed each other, but they didn’t like each other that much.
But, over the summer, there has been a shift. A softening. A coming together. Starmer and Rayner appear to realise that together they are more than the sum of their parts. That, actually, they work well together. They both have a lot to offer the other. It’s partly down to realpolitik. With the election probably only a year away, now is not the time for infighting. Labour need to show voters a united front and Starmer and Rayner had to get their acts together.
It’s more than that though. It’s a new maturity in their working relationship. The bickering has been replaced with a mutual appreciation. Keir has stopped treating Angie as a threat who must be sawn off at the knees whenever she gets too much media attention and now regards her as an asset. Not just a John Prescott to his Tony Blair. But a Barbara Castle. Someone who can get to parts of the labour movement he can’t. For her part, Angie has also wised up. Why condemn yourself to a lifetime of bickering for the leadership of a party in opposition? Far better to get real power as Starmer’s deputy in government.
Last year it was Starmer who got to address the Trades Union Congress congress. Or to give it its full name the Congress of the Trades Union Congress. That’s enough congress. The old Keir might have big-footed Rayner this time round and insisted on addressing the TUC again. You can imagine the excuses. Last congress before the election. The unions needed to hear from the Labour leader. Make a connection.
Instead, the Labour leader kicked back a bit. He didn’t avoid the TUC in Liverpool. He was up on Monday night having dinner with union leaders. But he was happy to let Rayner do the front-of-house gig with the speech to delegates in the hall. Give Angie a chance to shine and then bask in her reflected glory. Oddly it would also do no harm to be slightly keeping his distance. The Tory media would go wild if he had been love-bombed by the unions. They’d be screaming socialist revolution.
Rayner kept it fairly short and sweet. Oddly for a home team crowd, she initially appeared a little nervous. Her opening gag about Liverpool being famous for the Beatles and Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, bombed. She had been expecting laughter but was met with an awkward silence. The windowless hall is the enemy of any type of intimacy. An atmosphere vacuum.
But Angie soon hit her stride. Starting with her own backstory. Hers was a life turned round by being a member of a trade union and by New Labour’s genuine efforts at levelling up. Unlike the empty levelling up promises of the current Tory government. This was a story that Starmer could never tell. Not convincingly. Rayner’s early struggles have been of a different order to most MPs. Both Tory and Labour.
Starmer got mentioned twice. Of course he did. Both for giving her the job and for the scale of his vision. This was a thoroughly professional operation. There would be no opportunity for commentators to imagine any division. Labour United. Rayner then went on to say pretty much everything a TUC audience could have wanted to hear. All without committing Labour to spending anything. A new Labour government would repeal Tory anti-strike laws within the first 100 days and would at the same time present its own new deal for workers. Good for workers, good for business. She even promised an inquiry into Orgreave. Over and beyond.
Her final words came with a veiled warning. The general election would not be easy. Labour would do its bit – now it was up to the unions to do theirs. To not make difficult demands and to get behind the party. Oh, and to stump up more cash. But Rayner needn’t really have bothered. The TUC was already onside long before this. Come the end she received a standing ovation from the hall. The TUC loved her. And she loved them. Starmer’s decision to let her make the speech vindicated.
And it’s not just Keir and Angie who are living their best lives. The rest of the shadow frontbench are also enjoying themselves. They can almost touch the furniture in their future departments. That close after 13 years in the wilderness. None more so than Ed Miliband whose face is configured in a permagrin. Then he’s got a lot to be happy about. Not least that he’s fortunate enough to shadow the ever-absent Claire Coutinho. Whose main contribution to net zero is to make sure she knows and does net zero about everything.
There was no surprise Coutinho was yet again absent – she’s been abducted by aliens for all anyone knows – for an urgent question on the government’s latest round of bidding for offshore wind contracts. So it was left to the junior minister Graham Stuart to take the hit. And just to make it interesting for himself he chose to play the whole thing for laughs. Like many other ministers, he knows the game is up and is just determined to enjoy himself as best he can for the next year. So he’s chosen to express himself through interpretive dance. Either that or he’s taken far too many drugs.
“The auction round has been a terrific success,” he said, while throwing shapes at the dispatch box. “It couldn’t possibly have gone better.” The country was lucky to have the Tories. Miliband was momentarily non-plussed, before realising this was all just a game. Right, he said. Talk me through it. Literally no one bid for any contract. It was a shambles. If that was a success, what would failure look like? The government could have raised the minimum price for the contracts and still saved the country billions in electricity prices. In the meantime we were all paying more for fossil fuels.
Precisely, said Stuart. This was a win-win for the country. Because no one had bid last time they might be keener to bid more next time. Pigs flying. Then a man’s gotta believe in something. Even if it’s in his own extinction.
