The Media Couldn’t Stand Angela Rayner
The sneers about wine, holidays and clothes were never really about hypocrisy. They were about class, and the audacity of a working-class woman who refused to stay in her place.
The attacks on Angela Rayner tell us more about Britain’s media culture than about her. The right-wing press has always reserved its most poisonous barbs for women who breach the boundaries of class.
Look at the pattern. When a man in politics speculates on property, claims a freebie, or takes donor money, it is business as usual. When a working-class woman does the same, it becomes proof of hypocrisy, “gluttony,” even stupidity. Cosmetic surgery, a holiday in Ibiza, a pair of sunglasses: details that would barely merit a line if attached to a cabinet grandee become Exhibit A in the case against Rayner.
She was always going to be accused of being too much — too loud, too coarse, too ambitious, too brash. The press trades on that double bind: mock her as “authentic” when she spoke plainly, then mock her again for not being authentic enough once she enjoyed some of the privileges every MP takes for granted.
Behind the sneers is a deeper truth: Rayner punctured the idea that Westminster belongs to the Oxbridge lawyer or the think-tank technocrat. She spoke in a way that was recognisable to people outside the political bubble. That is why she was hated, and why the press worked so hard to reduce her to a caricature of appetite and vulgarity.
What rankles the Mail and its ilk is not Ibiza or wine or clothing allowances. It is that a woman who left school pregnant at sixteen, who worked as a carer, and who never learned to bow to the club rules of Westminster, got as far as she did.