Alex Massie
Who cares if Angela Rayner is a champagne socialist?
Let her drink bubbly!
What is it about Angela Rayner that so thoroughly irks so many Conservative MPs and their friends in the press? The Daily Telegraph could scarcely contain itself last week when it reported – exclusively! – that Labour’s deputy leader had attended a Glyndebourne performance of The Marriage of Figaro even as – get this! – other things were happening elsewhere. Not only had she attended the opera, she was seen attending it. Worse still, she was spotted drinking champagne. The nerve and the state of her!
Dominic Raab, whose parliamentary performances make Iain Duncan Smith’s seem alert, agile and vibrant, was at it again today. ‘Where was the right honourable lady when the comrades were on the picket line last Thursday?’ he demanded. ‘Where was she when the Labour front bench were joining them rather than standing-up for the public?’ Nowhere good, obviously. No, ‘She was at the Glyndebourne music festival sipping champagne, listening to opera.’ How very dare she.
Not that Raab was finished. No, the deputy prime minister had thought long and deep and awfully hard about his pay-off and he delivered it with what, for him, amounted to a flourish: ‘Champagne socialism is back in the Labour party.’ Take that, madam.
And what if it is? If we must have socialism, let it be accompanied by fine things. Why should champagne be reserved to those with the right credentials? Why, for that matter, is there something self-evidently ludicrous about a working-class person enjoying opera? Should she know her place and appreciate that somewhere such as Glyndebourne may never be her kind of place? If so, why?
It is not as though Raab, the son of a Czech immigrant who worked for Marks & Spencer, is a bona fide member of the gilded classes himself. Home counties, grammar school, and one of the less fashionable Oxford colleges hardly constitutes grounds for this kind of sneering.
I imagine I would disagree with Angela Rayner on any number of issues. But she has something about her and parliament is manifestly improved by her presence. She has an authenticity – to use a term much favoured by those inside the bubble – that many of her peers can only envy. The story of her childhood – caring for an illiterate, bipolar, mother; becoming a mother herself aged 16, a grandmother at 37 – is now sufficiently familiar as to require little retelling but the journey from that to her current position as deputy leader of the Labour party is the sort of trip that should impress anyone with an ounce of imagination, empathy, or humanity.
Keir Starmer’s Labour party is still in the business of defining itself. Phase one of Labour’s latest project was a matter of repudiating Corbynism. If that stain has not been wholly removed, it at least no longer defines the party. Comparing Starmer with Tony Blair is obviously a stretch but Rayner can offer something like what John Prescott gave Blair: an unavoidably Labour voice whispering in the leader’s ear that the party’s traditional values still have relevance and worth. If Starmer is ice, Rayner offers fire and it is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which, properly used, the Stormer-Rayner combination could prove effective.
Rayner may be more abrasive than her leader, she’s a puncher after all, but she’s also, importantly, a pragmatist. ‘You should be hardline’ on crime, she says, because the people who suffer most from crime are those whose lives are already on the hard side of difficult. Labour must stand for ‘opportunity and aspiration’ because if the Labour party doesn’t believe in personal and familial improvement, what does it believe in?
Why indeed? And why should working-class women be denied opera and champagne? The assumptions behind the jibes made at Rayner’s expense are as obvious as they are odious. They are also miserably revealing.