𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

She caused enough havoc under Keir Starmer, who never had the gumption to rein her in, until she was tripped up by her own tax return. When she was forced to resign from the cabinet, I swore that Red Ange would be “back with a vengeance”, and I was dead right. Now she’s got her hands all over Andy Burnham’s government, and she just won’t quit.

Burnham is determined to drag Britain back to the 1970s, and Rayner is tailor made for that decade. She’d be right at home in a smoky pub, supping pints with the union brothers while plotting the next strike. Labour members love her, of course. Rayner has a backstory and authenticity that any middle-class Labour careerist would drop their avocado toast to get their hands on. She doesn’t need to fake a tough upbringing. Hers was for real.

Rayner started life as a union rep and I bet she was a good one. As she said herself, she was “mouthy” and would “take no messing from management”. Nothing has changed, and it seems that nobody in the Labour Party dares mess with her either.

Rayner is also lifting the shackles on her trade union mates. After years of destroying public sector productivity, they’ll soon be wrecking private sector productivity too, and messing with management just like she did in her day.

Now Rayner has introduced rules that could allow councils to seize empty homes and rent them out. If you thought an Englishman’s home was his castle, forget it. Rayner just stormed it. It’s been called legalised theft.

She’s also attacked the Right to Buy scheme, allowing council tenants to buy their homes at a discount, despite having taken advantage of it herself. Now she’s riding roughshod over councils by setting impossible house building targets, ignoring fundamental challenges such as land shortages the lack of builders.

But we’ll all pay the price for her mad dash as union muscle keeps growing, the economy slows, jobs vanish, rents rise and Labour’s ultimate loose cannon blows away colleagues who refuse to toe the Angela Rayner line. She’s going to be popping everywhere, and we’ll all pay the price.