Be warned, Ange, Keir and Rachel: three’s a crowd

This is Adam Boulton’s weekly column for Reaction. Subscribe to Reaction here.

Angela Rayner is emphatic that a triumvirate will lead Labour into the general election and beyond. Into government, they hope. “Because it’s me, Keir and Rachel. It’s not the duo, it’s the trio”, she insisted to a sympathetic interviewer this weekend.

That will be the putative prime minister, deputy prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer then. This combo has worked in long-lasting governments before such as Margaret Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw and Geoffrey Howe or Tony Blair, John Prescott and Gordon Brown. Though never with such disparate personalities or with one man and two contrasting women bound together in power.

It is hard to make a trio work. The old saying is that “two’s company, three’s a crowd” or as Princess Diana put it: “There were three of us in this marriage. So it was a bit crowded.” 

The leadership of the Labour party is not about romantic attachments. But since all three of the partners at the top have admitted that they see more of each other than they do of their respective families, it is worth considering how the human factor will play out.

For a start, do the others see their relationship as a threesome, like “Ange”? That is not the impression they give. Starmer and Reeves are seen more often with each other promoting their iron determination not to tax or spend more than the Tories. All plans, including Rayner’s, are referred upwards for a likely Reeves veto. 

Reeves is on a never-ending round of re-assuring “business” and interviewers that the economy will be safe in her hands. Rayner is being kept away from public policy discussions by Labour’s media handlers, who have confined her mainly to telling feature writers about her remarkable hard-scrabble rise to Westminster. 

Rayner tells those trade union and Labour audiences she is allowed to address that her “new deal for working people” people would be brought forward in the first hundred days of a Labour government. Ask the shadow Treasury team and they refuse to confirm or deny this. Peter Mandelson snipes at the proposals in The Sunday Times and off-the-record briefings hint that the proposals will be lucky to make it into the election manifesto ungelded. In last week’s Mais lecture Reeves raised questions about a centre piece of the new deal – precisely which zero-hours contracts would be banned – as ever without giving specific details. 

Reeves and Rayner have both been embedded in the Labour movement all their lives but beyond both being self-made, state-educated, and self-conscious about their speaking voices, their backgrounds are dramatically different. 

As befits the founder of “securonomics”, Rachel Reeves had a steady upbringing. Both her parents were head teachers in Greater London. She was the British under-14 Chess champion. She read the politician’s gold standard PPE at New College, Oxford University, followed by an MSc in Economics at the LSE. As an economist she worked for HBOS, followed by, as Labour never tires of reminding us, the Bank of England and the British Embassy in Washington DC. She stood for parliament twice in a safe Tory seat, before being elected from an all-woman shortlist as MP for Leeds West in 2010. She is one of the best-connected MPs at Westminster – her sister and brother-in-law are also Labour MPs. Her husband, Nicholas Joicey, is a senior civil servant. They have two children.

Rayner, who at forty-four this week is a year younger than Reeves, got to Westminster five years later as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, not far from Stockport where she grew up. Her father was alcoholic and often absent. Her mother never learnt to read. She had health problems which meant Rayner was her carer at a young age. Rayner told The Guardian this weekend “I don’t want to go on Who do you think you are?, I dread to think who I am!”. At 16, she left school without qualifications when she had a son by her first boyfriend. Subsequently, she passed NVQ in social care and worked in the sector. This led her to become a regional convenor for Unison, the trade union, and from there into politics “to unlock the potential of people like me”. She has three children.  

Sir Keir Starmer can choose who he wants as head of his Treasury team but he cannot sack the deputy leader because they are elected in their own right. In 2021, after Labour’s traumatic defeat in the Hartlepool byelection he tried and failed to demote Rayner. After a showdown, she emerged with more responsibilities and the understanding that he would appoint her formally as Deputy Prime Minister in the event of victory, like “John Prescott in a skirt”.

For now, Keir Starmer does not have to choose between his two leading ladies, who each appeal to different sections of the coalition of voters he desperately needs. Reeves’ confident competence appeals to centrists. Rayner effortlessly gets the party faithful going.

Her wild red hair is the exception to the New Labour bob favoured by most of the women on the front bench. Not to mention the tattoos and daring dress sense. Outspoken about everything from her boob job to shooting terrorists first, asking questions later, Rayner has star quality and a genuine old Labour backstory. 

She describes herself as “soft left” and did not back Jeremy Corbyn initially for the leadership. She is no socialist puritan and has adapted easily to the demands of being a privy councillor, with admirers across the political spectrum in spite of her late-night party conference reference to the Conservatives as “homophobic, racist misogynistic…scum”. 

Those who set out to portray Rayner as a lefty Red Queen in a recent biography found that she is, from their point of view disappointingly, pragmatic and aspirational. The big story to come from the book concerns her purchase of a council house under right to buy and alleged tax avoidance.

Reeves has worked hard to improve her presentation in the decade since she was memorably dismissed as “boring, snoring” by the editor of Newsnight. Still, few would describe her as exciting – a trait she shares with Starmer. Nothing surprising is ever likely to come out of her mouth. If she makes any big economic moves, they will be unheralded in advance, like Gordon Brown’s independence for the Bank of England. Reeves cites the understated Alistair Darling rather than Brown as her favourite Labour chancellor. 

It may be that Reeves and Rayner will carry on working constructively as part of the same team. As so often, Sue Gray is said to be on patrol. Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is reported to enjoy good relations with both women and to be ready to sort out clashes between them. The nation shall see in the months and maybe years to come.

Boldness and empathy on one side and hard-edged caution and reassurance on the other will always be a volatile mixture. The red head and the black. Sir Keir Starmer will be a lucky man indeed if he can have it both ways. 

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