Ashcroft Red Queen?

The Unauthorised Biography of Angela Rayner
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-871-2
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Angela Rayner is one of the most arresting figures in British politics today. A self-declared socialist, she pursued an unorthodox route to Westminster, leaving school and giving birth to her first child aged sixteen having gained no formal qualifications. After becoming a care worker, she was a trade union representative before entering the House of Commons in 2015 as the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. She served as the shadow Secretary of State for Education for four years from 2016 and was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party in April 2020. Rayner's life story has earned her a reputation as an authentic working-class voice and, thanks to her own power base and combative performances in the Commons Chamber, she is widely considered to be a standout figure among Sir Keir Starmer's shadow Cabinet. But who is the real Angela Rayner? What does she actually believe in? What is she like behind the scenes? Can she unite the factions of her party to endorse the Starmer project? And does she harbour ambitions for the top job? This careful examination of her background and career seeks to answer these questions and many more. Michael Ashcroft's new book follows the journey of a politician who has quickly become an outspoken and charismatic presence in British public life.

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democracy Union. He is founder and chairman of the board of trustees of Crimestoppers, vice-patron of the Intelligence Corps Museum, chairman of the trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, a senior fellow of the International Strategic Studies Association, a life governor of the Royal Humane Society, a former chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a former trustee of Imperial War Museums. Lord Ashcroft is an award-winning author who has written twenty-seven other books, largely on politics and bravery. His political books include biographies of David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Carrie Johnson. His seven books on gallantry in the Heroes series include two on the Victoria Cross.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashcroft, Michael

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Girl Guide

A familiar complaint made of Westminster’s MPs by some voters has been that too few of them have truly working-class origins and too many of them have insufficient experience of ‘real life’. Instead, it is claimed, a disproportionately high number of Britain’s elected representatives have rolled off what is in effect a production line limited to just three phases: after leaving university they work for a politician or party; eventually they are parachuted or otherwise helped into a winnable parliamentary seat to contest themselves; and finally they take their place in the House of Commons, having barely broken into a sweat. It has been said that the prevalence of this cycle has further damaged the link between everyday people and those who speak for them. There is undoubtedly some truth in this idea. In the post-war years more parliamentarians – particularly on the Labour benches – were likelier to have walked one of various hard roads before seeking national office, thereby insulating them from accusations of belonging to a remote political class. Since the 1990s, however, the backgrounds of many MPs have become more uniform, perhaps as a consequence of deindustrialisation and the expansion of tertiary education. Inevitably, though, there are exceptions to the new rules. In 2024 it is generally agreed that Angela Rayner’s tough upbringing makes her the most prominent example of a politician who has overcome a variety of challenges to reach the top of a political party without having enjoyed the start in life that most people might assume is necessary.

Angela Rayner was born Angela Bowen at the Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport on 28 March 1980. Her father, Martyn, married her mother, Lynne Ingram, in Stockport Register Office in June 1977 when he was a 21-year-old storeman and she was an eighteen-year-old bookbinder. At the time of Rayner’s birth, they already had a son, Darren, who was born in 1978. A younger sibling, Tracey, was born on Christmas Day in 1982. Both the Bowen and Ingram families hailed from the north-west of England, and according to census records they had been involved in manual labour and skilled trade there for generations. Tracing Rayner’s paternal line back to the beginning of the twentieth century reveals that her great-grandfather, Thomas Bowen, was a printer in Stockport. Her grandfather, who was also called Thomas Bowen, was a machine operator in the same town. On Rayner’s mother’s side, her great-grandfather, Oliver Ingram, was a wire weaver in Manchester and her maternal grandfather, Harold Ingram, made wooden boxes before becoming a toolmaker in and around Manchester.

In the various interviews Rayner has given over the past decade or so, she seems to have pulled no punches when it comes to discussing her personal life, explaining with candour that her childhood was materially deprived and emotionally fractured. Although her parents each listed an occupation on their marriage certificate in 1977, and despite her father changing his profession to ‘warehouseman’ at the time of their youngest child’s birth five years after that, Rayner has never publicly suggested that either of them held down a steady job when she was a girl. Instead, she has been open about the fact that the family lived in council-owned properties and relied on welfare payments and Giro cheques. As to the lack of love and support shown to her by her parents, which she has also discussed in some depth, she has always maintained that their complicated personalities, the explosive nature of their marital relationship, and their own bleak childhoods meant they were not in the habit of indulging their own children with so much as a hug or a kiss. As she told Times Radio in September 2021: ‘I’m sure my parents loved me, but they didn’t know how to show they loved me. It was implied that you didn’t get cuddles.’1

Rayner has also acknowledged that her mother was raised in what sound like even more difficult circumstances than she herself endured. In Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, it is fair to say that poverty bore a stronger link to what had been suffered during the Victorian era than many people today might imagine, and Rayner’s mother apparently lived through the worst of it. She was one of twelve children and grew up on a housing estate in Wythenshawe, just south of Manchester. Two of her siblings were simply ‘given away’ to a neighbouring Christian couple, according to Rayner, presumably because they could not be cared for. By the age of twelve, Rayner’s mother had dropped out of school having never learnt how to read or write. She also suffers from bipolar disorder. Formerly known as manic depression, this condition of extreme mood swings can strike anybody at any time, though it is often believed to manifest itself first in those aged fifteen to twenty.

Less is known of Rayner’s father’s early life, but Rayner has revealed that the foundations of her parents’ marriage were shaky from the start. ‘One of the stories was that he got with my mum because the person who was the love of his life ran off with somebody else and he knew my mum would never leave him,’ Rayner explained to the BBC in 2017.2 Her father was not an easy man to live with, according to Rayner. She has spoken many times of his quick temper, his disciplinarian nature and his habit of shouting menacingly. In October 2023, a Guardian interviewer even reported for the first time that her father ‘scared her so much she would wet the bed’.3 She has also indicated that it was not unusual for him to be absent from home without explanation. Others who contributed to this book but who did not wish to be identified claimed that, during her childhood, Rayner’s father was ‘a ducker and a diver’ who dabbled in various moneymaking schemes, including driving a taxi. But he is said to have paid little attention to her mother and shown scant interest in helping her to deal with her mental health problems. Politics was not a feature of the household, but Rayner has recalled that, although her father read the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror regularly, he also had instincts that are more often associated with the political right. She told Nick Robinson of the BBC in 2018: ‘I used to have a phrase: “council house Tory”. My dad was one.’ She then went on to point out what she considers to be the irony of her father having railed against ‘scroungers’ when he was himself a recipient of regular welfare payments.4

In fact, the MP for Stockport between 1983 and 1992 was Tony Favell, a Conservative who was also an ardent Thatcherite. It is impossible to know whether his status as the town’s elected representative at Westminster, or whether any of the policies pursued by Mrs Thatcher’s governments, played any part in shaping Martyn Bowen’s opinions. Favell, however, who retains a link to the area via his presidency of the Stockport Conservative Association, says that he can recall canvassing for re-election in 1987 and being surprised by the depth of support there for his party:

I remember going to a terraced house in a working-class area in Stockport and a man answered the door and said: ‘I’m going to vote for you.’ When I asked him why, he said: ‘I can’t bear the woman [Margaret Thatcher], but she’s right.’ It made me realise that my own party underestimates the nous of the British electorate,

says Favell. He adds: ‘Knowing the kind of situation that Angela Rayner was brought up in, I think what she’s achieved is remarkable and I applaud it, whilst regretting her failure to change her political outlook.’ Stockport, incidentally, did change its political outlook, and has been represented by Labour MPs since 1992.

Stockport is one of the ten metropolitan districts that make up Greater Manchester. It lies about six miles south-east of Manchester city centre. Like many towns in Britain, it has a proud industrial past, in its case thanks to being on the canal network and having strong links to the nineteenth-century textile industry. Indeed, it became famous around the world as a centre for hat-making. Yet the poverty of some of its inhabitants has long been acknowledged. In his 1845 book The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels wrote of Stockport being ‘renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes’, going on to say that it ‘looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent’. He added that he found the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working class there ‘repulsive’.5

As the textile industry declined during the twentieth century, Stockport reinvented itself. However, if the Community Care Plan report produced by Stockport’s social services division in October 1991 is to be believed, it did so with mixed success. Using statistics stretching back to the early 1980s, this report acts as a useful outline of the town’s prospects during Rayner’s formative years.

It stated that by the early 1990s, the borough’s population was steady at about 290,000, with a...