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.
