Keir Starmer’s relaunch descends into shambles amid Rayner row

Keir Starmer’s attempted relaunch after Labour’s election disaster fell flat today after he blinked first in a standoff with Angela Rayner.

The leader has suffered another major blow to his authority amid claims he wanted to shift his deputy into the health brief after stripping her of responsibility for campaigns – but she refused.

In the end he was forced to give Ms Rayner a new job at the top of the party shadowing Michael Gove, with her allies boasting she is ‘even more powerful’.

Other moves in the overhaul were also far more limited than heralded. In the biggest change, shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds was demoted and replaced by Rachel Reeves.

Opposition chief whip Nick Brown and Commons leader Valerie Vaz were also removed from the shadow cabinet.

But Sir Keir had to scale back his ambitions dramatically as he faced a furious backlash over the botched sacking of Mrs Rayner, with the hard-Left accusing him of ‘cowardice’ and openly threatening a coup.

The embattled leader tried to paper over the cracks as he assembled his team for its first meeting today. ‘I take responsibility. nobody else. I lead the Labour party and it is entirely on me,’ he reportedly told them.

But there are claims that tensions have been running high with Ms Rayner for months – including a row over ‘inappropriate dress’ she wore for a visit to Hartlepool in March.

Photographs from the date show Ms Rayner in leopard-print trousers, heavy black boots and a hoodie. There are also swipes that Sir Keir’s team views her as an ‘oik’.  

Worryingly for Sir Keir, the criticism has come from both wings of the party – with jibes that his closest aides are inept and act like they are in an episode of the West Wing. 

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham complained that ‘negative’ coverage had overshadowed his result on Saturday, and the way Ms Rayner was treated was ‘not right’.  

Ms Rayner has tweeted to thank supporters for their ‘solidarity’. And this morning she insisted that she will ensure Labour stays the ‘party of workers’.

‘I was born in Stockport but I was raised in the labour movement.’ she said. 

‘As we build an economy fit for the future and develop policy for the future of work, trade unions will be absolutely at the heart of it. Labour is, and always will be, the party of workers.’ 

Sir Keir is unable to axe his deputy altogether as she was elected separately by members, but did take away her roles as party chairman and national campaign co-ordinator on Saturday night in the wake of Labour’s catastrophic local election results.

However, following 24 hours of wrangling, she emerged with a new broad brief shadowing Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove, as well as leading the party’s focus on the future of work.

Allies of Ms Rayner last night triumphantly declared: ‘Angela obviously comes out of this significantly more powerful both in terms of the party and policy. She will be much more visible now she isn’t being held back.

‘She will lead both party reform and the development of a policy agenda that is credible, radical and actually connects with the voters we need to win.’

In a sign Sir Keir and Ms Rayner have not managed to bury the hatchet, one party insider asked: ‘Who would want to be national campaign co-ordinator in name only with no power when you’re made the scapegoat for the failures of Keir’s team?’

Another supporter of Ms Rayner said: ‘On Friday Keir couldn’t answer a simple question about what Labour’s vision is, what our offer is and how we will win back the voters in our heartland seats.

‘Angela can answer that question and is the best person to lead the fightback in the Red Wall.’ 

According to the Guardian, Oldham MP Jim McMahon, who ran the Hartlepool by-election campaign and is an ally of Sir Keir, complained to the leader’s office that Ms Rayner had been ‘dressed inappropriately’ on a visit to the town on March 21. 

Photographs from the date show Ms Rayner in leopard-print trousers, heavy black boots and a hoodie. 

Ms Rayner’s aides are said to have ‘hit the roof ‘ when they heard about the comment, but kept it from her to avoid fuelling the problems even further.

Allies of Mr McMahon insisted he was simply unhappy about the pictures selected for a leaflet. 

Sources also told the Guardian that Ms Rayner was seen by the leader’s aides as a ‘working-class oik and a bit thick’ who doesn’t fit their ‘patronising Camden style’. 

Another Labour source, without loyalties to Ms Rayner, told the paper:  ‘It’s a clear mistake to fire someone who speaks like the people we need to talk to. It’s a huge mistake from a bunch of snobs who don’t like how she speaks.’ 

Mr Burham – who fuelled talk of leadership ambitions over the weekend when he said he was ready to pick up the phone if the party needed him – said this morning that Ms Rayner’s treatment was not ‘right’.

‘I didn’t like the way that was handled, I’ll be honest, and I didn’t see why we were getting a negative story on Saturday night when myself and Steve Rotheram and other people around the country had good victories to celebrate, so that wasn’t right, but I don’t think the way Angela was treated was right,’ he said.

‘But it’s been resolved and we move on from this morning. There’s a shadow cabinet in place now.

‘I hope that they are getting on with the job in exactly the same way that I am getting on with the job.’

Former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said Sir Keir had tried to make Mrs Rayner ‘carry the can for the poor results at the weekend’.

‘It does seem as if, certainly the people around him (Sir Keir Starmer), don’t understand how the party works,’ the former shadow home secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘They tried to sack Angela Rayner in order to make her carry the can for the poor results at the weekend.

‘They didn’t seem to realise that because she’s an elected deputy leader, you can fiddle around with her title, but you can’t sack her, she remains a senior person in the shadow cabinet.’

When asked if it was the view of deputy leader Ms Rayner that Sir Keir wanted to sack her, Ms Abbott said: ‘Yes, that’s what all the briefing was about.

‘It was a foolish thing to even think about and he has had to walk it back – you can’t sack an elected deputy leader.’

Ms Dodds, who as Shadow Chancellor had been accused of failing to land a blow on Rishi Sunak, has been moved to become party chairman and will lead Labour’s policy review.

Her replacement, Ms Reeves, is one of Labour’s high profile frontbenchers, although her promotion from shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is likely to annoy those on the Left of the party.

Shabana Mahmood has been appointed national campaign co-ordinator, Sir Alan Campbell made chief whip, and Thangam Debbonaire will be the new shadow Commons leader.

Senior frontbenchers whom the Labour leader had considered sacking – including Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy, Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds and health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth – were all spared. 

In interviews this morning, Ms Mahmood admitted that Labour needs to ‘earn the trust of voters again’.

She also admitted that the looming Batley and Spen by-election – triggered because sitting Labour MP Tracey Brabin is becoming West Yorks mayor – will be a ‘big test’.

Ms Mahmood told BBC Breakfast: ‘It is no doubt going to be a big test. It is an important by-election for us.

‘We have just won in West Yorkshire and that is the base on which we have to build.

‘I am in no doubt as to the amount of work that needs to be done.

‘Part of my role is to get every part of our elections machine working effectively to put together a winning platform for Labour candidates all across the country.’

She said she will be heading to Batley and Spen to learn from the party on the ground and the local team, and also to ‘learn the lessons we need to learn from the places where we have suffered defeat to earn the trust of voters again – that is the only show in town and that is the thing that the whole of our movement has to be focused on’.

Sir Keir last night said he believed Labour ‘must be the party that embraces the demand for change across our country’. 

‘That will require bold ideas and a relentless focus on the priorities of the British people,’ he added.

But Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP who quit the frontbench following the election results, criticised the party’s identity. 

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Mahmood said: ‘We are seen as out of touch, a party captured by urban liberals, whose most vocal supporters are university graduates with woke politics straight from the world of Left-wing campus protests.’

‘The other 50 per cent of society – aspirational and looking for better opportunities – does not think we have the answers. 

‘I fear that too much of my party’s energy has gone into identity politics and niche culture wars.’

Grangela v Sir Keir: Row between the smooth-talking self-made London lawyer and the Mancunian former single mother that is threatening to tear Labour apart once again 

He is the smooth-talking self-made London lawyer and Remain flagbearer whose socialist parents names him after Labour’s founding hero.

She is a former Stockport teenage single mother and child carer who hauled herself up the political ladder through sheer hard work.

But the relationship between Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner is threatening to tear the party apart yet again as faultlines between the hard Left and moderate wings are re-exposed.

Sir Keir’s attempt to quietly remove her as party chairman as a scapegoat for the electoral catastrophies in Hartlepool, the Tees valley and the West Midlands blew up at the weekend and arguably helped increase her power within the party.

Both have some things in common, coming from humble backgrounds and being relative newcomers in the Commons. They both entered the House in the 2015 election that saw Ed Miliband defeated by David Cameron to form the first full Tory government since 1997.

Here we examine their different journeys to the top of the Labour Party.

Sir Keir Starmer 

Sir Kier Starmer was raised by socialist parents who named him after Keir Hardie, the Labour leader’s founder and a colossus of the socialist movement.

He is married to Victoria, who works in the NHS, and they have two children. 

In Who’s Who he refers to his parents Rodney and Josephine Starmer as ‘Rod and Jo’.

During his leadership campaign and afterwards he was at pains to describe his father as a toolmaker and Jo formerly a nurse before suffering from a physical disability.

As well as devoting themselves to rescuing donkeys, Rod and Jo had four children. Sir Keir’s three siblings went to comprehensive school while he passed his 11-plus and went to Reigate Grammar School.

The shadow minister has said about his happy home life that ‘whenever one of us left home, they were replaced with a donkey’. 

He then went on to become the first member of his family to go to University. He studied law at Leeds and did a post-graduate degree at St Edmund Hall Oxford, before joining the Middle Temple chambers of Sir John Mortimer, the late barrister and novelist.

He went on to specialise in defending in human rights cases and became a Queen’s Counsel (QC) in 2002.

Just six years later, and despite being a defence specialist, he was made director of public prosecutions (DPP), the head of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Cases he oversaw included the prosecution of then Lib Dem Cabinet minister Chris Huhne for perverting the course of justice.

He held the post until 2013 and was subsequently knighted in 2014 for his service in the role.

He held Holborn and St Pancras for Labour in 2015 after its MP, the late Frank Dobson, retired.

Under predecessor Jeremy Corbyn he was shadow Brexit secretary, but did not often appear to be onthe same wavelength as the party leader.

While Mr Corbyn was a Brexiteer of decades longstanding, Sir Keir was a vocal cheerleader for the majority Remain faction within Labour. 

This led to many of the more leftwing figures within the party to accuse him of undermining the hard Left leader, by vocally championing the softest of Brexits, and a second referendum.  

After Labour’s humiliation in the 2019 General Election led to Mr Corbyn quitting,  Sir Keir ran to replace him on a moderate, unifying platform. He comfortably beat Corbynite candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey to take charge in April.

He attempted to keep the Left onside by giving shadow Cabinet posts to Ms Long-Bailey and a few other survivors of the previous regime. But he is unable to remove Ms Rayner as the deputy leader is elected by party members just as he is. 

Like Mr Corbyn, he is an Arsenal fan.

Angela Rayner 

Angela Rayner’s socialist credentials were forged by a tough upbringing as a carer to her bipolar mother aged just 10 before becoming pregnant with the first of her three children at the age of 16.

The flame-haired 41-year-old has drawn on her experience as a one-time struggling teenage mother throughout her political career.  

She proudly welcomed her own granddaughter at the age of just 37 in 2017 with a tweet jokingly referring to herself as ‘Grangela’ after son Ryan Ryan became a father to baby Lilith Mae.

Ms Rayner was just 16 when she had Ryan, and has told how becoming pregnant so young ‘saved’ her.

She  has two other sons aged under 10, Jimmy and Charlie, who was born at 23 weeks and is registered blind.

She says Charlie would not be alive today without the NHS.

Her teenage relationship with Ryan’s father ended quickly and married Unison official Mark Rayner. But they split up last summer.

 She also acted as a carer to her mother, Lynn Bowen, when just a child.

In 202 she opened up about her tough early life, revealing she once had to have her sectioned to prevent her from self-harming. 

In a joint interview with ITV News, Ms Bowen credits her daughter with saving her, saying she would not have survived without her.

‘I was in a very dark place, she used to bath me, look after me, feed me,’ Ms Bowen said of her daughter.

‘If it wasn’t for her I don’t think I’d be here today.’

Ms Rayner  was only elected to Parliament as the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne for the first time in 2015 but she has swiftly risen up the ranks to national prominence. 

It did not take long for her to be welcomed to the Labour frontbench under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn as she was made shadow education secretary in 2016. 

She became one of Mr Corbyn’s most vocal defenders, both in the House of Commons and on the airwaves, before the party sank to its disastrous general election defeat in December 2019. 

She swiftly launched a bid for the party’s deputy leadership in the aftermath of the car crash poll, standing on a so-called hard-left ‘dream ticket’ with Westminster housemate and former frontbencher Rebecca Long-Bailey who put herself forward for the top job. 

However, unlike Ms Long-Bailey, who rated Mr Corbyn’ leadership 10/10, she was unafraid to criticise him.

In February 2020 she said he failed as Labour leader because he ‘didn’t command respect’ and had not been able to unite the party. 

She also insisted she could succeed where Mr Corbyn had struggled because she ‘resonates with people in the country in a way that Jeremy doesn’t’. 

While Ms Long-Bailey failed to become leader, Ms Rayner was elected as Sir Keir Starmer’s deputy with an overwhelming mandate from party supporters.

It is this mandate that makes Sir Keir’s attempt to pass blame for the election woes on to her attract so much vocal criticism.  

Allies of the deputy leader believe she is much better places to woo-back disenchanted northern voters than a London lawyer.