Angela Rayner is the most disappointing British politician of her generation, which is my generation. To secure disaffiliation from the Labour Party and then to build what came next, join Unite Community here. But a family home, a tied cottage and a holiday flat are not "a property empire", although the question of how Rayner had come to be worth £4.5 million is pertinent to a long list of politicians of all stripes.
And no one becomes Deputy Prime Minister by accident. Rayner is to introduce legislation to ban directly elected Mayors from standing for Parliament, thereby keeping out Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham as potential rivals for the Premiership, by no means necessarily at a time of Keir Starmer's choosing. If, like Starmer or like Wes Streeting, you did not go to school with girls like that, then you will never understand.
Streeting is one of the oddest characters to have emerged in British politics in a very long time. Like Bridget Phillipson's, his hard luck origin story tastes over-egged. Why do we never hear from any of his six siblings or his stepsister? His claim to have left the Labour Party over the Iraq War would have been laughable even if his having done so would not have been an absolute bar to his subsequent employment.
And in a crowded field, no section of the British electorate is more viscerally anti-Labour than the working-class Tory subculture in London and in the post-War Cockney diaspora. Yet as the heir to his conveniently dead paternal grandfather, Streeting presents himself as that tradition's torchbearer. In and through the Labour Party. What?
Streeting certainly used to put out the feelers at the NUS.
ReplyDeleteI have long tried to persuade someone specific to go public about that.
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