“Angela Rayner is no longer ‘on manoeuvres’,” said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. The former deputy PM is now targeting Keir Starmer “with live rounds”. In a speech last week to the soft-left Momentum group, she said that Labour was fighting for survival and “running out of time”. She also condemned the PM’s plans to make it harder for migrants to gain settled status, calling them “un-British” and a “breach of trust”.
A leftward change of tack
Rayner is clearly setting herself up to replace Starmer after Labour’s expected hammering in May’s local elections – and she may succeed. She’s popular with the Labour movement, and her fellow MPs are desperate. Prior to Labour’s catastrophic by-election loss in Gorton and Denton a month ago, they were “prepared to tolerate a strategy that focused on neutralising Reform UK”. But they now regard the Greens as an existential threat.
A leftward change of tack – whether under Starmer or Rayner – makes electoral sense for Labour, said Andy Beckett in The Guardian. Analysis shows that its loss of support to the Greens, Lib Dems and other parties is “larger and more reversible” than its loss of support to Reform. With today’s fragmented electorate, fortune will favour parties that get their vote out. Securing as little as 25% of the electorate could win a lot of closely contested seats.
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‘Power over process’
But is Britain ready to accept Rayner as PM, asked Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. There’s no doubt that she’s a deft operator with a great life story and considerable charm. “Watch her when she is with the King,” an MP told me. “Now imagine her in the Oval Office with [Donald] Trump. It would work.” Rayner would lead in a different way to Starmer – “not least because, unlike him, she relishes power over process”. With the row over her tax affairs expected to be settled before May, she is ready to join the fray.
But while her attacks on immigration reform may cheer some Labour MPs, they won’t go down well with many voters. Targeting that policy is a “strange decision”, said John Rentoul in The Independent. If, as Rayner claims, Labour must “show the British people whose side we’re on”, it makes little sense to make “soft on immigration” one’s signature policy.