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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Angela Rayner is one of the most arresting figures in British politics today. A self-declared socialist, she pursued an unorthodox route to Westminster, leaving school and giving birth to her first child aged sixteen having gained no formal qualifications. After becoming a care worker, she was a trade union representative before entering the House of Commons in 2015 as the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. She served as the shadow Secretary of State for Education for four years from 2016 and was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party in April 2020. Rayner's life story has earned her a reputation as an authentic working-class voice and, thanks to her own power base and combative performances in the Commons Chamber, she is widely considered to be a standout figure among Sir Keir Starmer's shadow Cabinet. But who is the real Angela Rayner? What does she actually believe in? What is she like behind the scenes? Can she unite the factions of her party to endorse the Starmer project? And does she harbour ambitions for the top job? This careful examination of her background and career seeks to answer these questions and many more. Michael Ashcroft's new book follows the journey of a politician who has quickly become an outspoken and charismatic presence in British public life.
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iii
Contents
Author’s Royalties
Lord Ashcroft is donating all author’s royalties from Red Queen? to charity.viii
Introduction
In May 2021, the Observer columnist Barbara Ellen asked: ‘Is Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, resting on her working-class laurels rather too much?’ While acknowledging that she has a ‘powerful’ life story and that ‘working-class visibility in Westminster is important’, Ellen then wrote: ‘Still, Rayner doesn’t half bang on about it or let others do it for her.’ She wondered whether ‘overawed, middle-class politicos, have been cowed into unquestioningly gulping down Rayner’s self-mythology or whether she herself feels that her righteous background makes her untouchable’. She went on to assert that Rayner’s ‘snaky’ reaction that month to Sir Keir Starmer’s botched shadow Cabinet reshuffle ‘outed her as untrustworthy and slippery’. She pondered if her appeal to working-class voters was as strong as is assumed. And she concluded that ‘class credibility is always valid, but as a starting point. Sooner or later, the question will always be: what else have you got?’1
It is a question worth asking. Though Angela Rayner has been ready to speak about herself at every opportunity, little independent research into her background or early career has ever been published. For this reason I decided that it might be revealing – and xperhaps important – to find out more about a politician who has become so prominent in Westminster in such a short space of time.
Barely a year after Rayner’s first election to the House of Commons in May 2015, she had been appointed by Jeremy Corbyn as his shadow Education Secretary. Less than four years after that she was elected as the deputy leader of the Labour Party. And by September 2023, she had been promised the post of Deputy Prime Minister in a future Sir Keir Starmer government. Most would agree that such a rapid rise is remarkable. But how did Rayner achieve it? And what does it say about British politics one quarter of the way through the twenty-first century that she did not have to wait longer to reach such heights, as would once have been the case?
Like anybody with an interest in politics, I was aware that Rayner was raised in very tough circumstances, that she had left school with no qualifications, and that she was a mother aged sixteen before becoming a Home Help and then a trade unionist. I also knew that, having cleared these various hurdles and arrived in Westminster, she was immediately regarded by many as a lively addition to the House of Commons and to the political scene more broadly. Those who are not afraid to speak their mind tend to find a way to get their message across, after all. Yet thanks to things that she has said about her political opponents, she is not an uncontroversial figure either. She has certainly made enough inflammatory comments to attract plenty of attention.
I wanted to find out more about who she is personally, what she believes in politically, what drives her and what she is like to work with and for. Does she get on with Starmer? Can she unite the factions of her party to endorse his project? How would she cope with the pressures of high office if Labour did form the next government? Which policies would she push particularly if she were xiin a position to do so? And does she harbour ambitions to serve as Prime Minister one day?
Many journalists have spoken to Angela Rayner over the past decade or so, yet few have been willing to challenge her. The large number of interviews that Rayner has given equips her biographer with a valuable means of doing so: by testing statements she has made or by using those statements as a starting point for further inquiries.
Whatever anybody who reads this book thinks of Angela Rayner – and she does divide opinion and is capable of generating strong reactions – she is now close enough to power to be taken seriously.
Michael Ashcroft March 2024
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
I have chosen to refer to Angela Rayner as ‘Rayner’ throughout this book. Although she used her maiden name, Bowen, until September 2010, it was not until after that date that she became a public figure and she has almost always been referred to by her married name on official documents and in media reports since then.xii
251NOTES
1 Barbara Ellen, ‘Less of the backstory, Angela Rayner, it’s beginning to wear a bit thin’, The Observer, 15 May 2021, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/15/less-of-your-backstory-angela-rayner-show-us-your-political-credibility
Acknowledgements
Among the many people who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book, most asked not to be named publicly. For this reason, it is not possible to identify here everybody who deserves thanks. They know who they are, however, and I want to express my gratitude to them for providing the various background briefings that proved so useful.
Thanks must also go to the formidable Angela Entwistle and her team, as well as to those at Biteback Publishing who were involved in the production of this book, and to Syd Lloyd, Simon Trump, David Wharton and the staff of Stockport Local Heritage Library. And special thanks to my chief researcher, Miles Goslett.xiv
Chapter 1
Girl Guide
A familiar complaint made of Westminster’s MPs by some voters has been that too few of them have truly working-class origins and too many of them have insufficient experience of ‘real life’. Instead, it is claimed, a disproportionately high number of Britain’s elected representatives have rolled off what is in effect a production line limited to just three phases: after leaving university they work for a politician or party; eventually they are parachuted or otherwise helped into a winnable parliamentary seat to contest themselves; and finally they take their place in the House of Commons, having barely broken into a sweat. It has been said that the prevalence of this cycle has further damaged the link between everyday people and those who speak for them. There is undoubtedly some truth in this idea. In the post-war years more parliamentarians – particularly on the Labour benches – were likelier to have walked one of various hard roads before seeking national office, thereby insulating them from accusations of belonging to a remote political class. Since the 1990s, however, the backgrounds of many MPs have become more uniform, perhaps as a consequence of deindustrialisation and the expansion of tertiary education. Inevitably, though, there 2are exceptions to the new rules. In 2024 it is generally agreed that Angela Rayner’s tough upbringing makes her the most prominent example of a politician who has overcome a variety of challenges to reach the top of a political party without having enjoyed the start in life that most people might assume is necessary.
Angela Rayner was born Angela Bowen at the Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport on 28 March 1980. Her father, Martyn, married her mother, Lynne Ingram, in Stockport Register Office in June 1977 when he was a 21-year-old storeman and she was an eighteen-year-old bookbinder. At the time of Rayner’s birth, they already had a son, Darren, who was born in 1978. A younger sibling, Tracey, was born on Christmas Day in 1982. Both the Bowen and Ingram families hailed from the north-west of England, and according to census records they had been involved in manual labour and skilled trade there for generations. Tracing Rayner’s paternal line back to the beginning of the twentieth century reveals that her great-grandfather, Thomas Bowen, was a printer in Stockport. Her grandfather, who was also called Thomas Bowen, was a machine operator in the same town. On Rayner’s mother’s side, her great-grandfather, Oliver Ingram, was a wire weaver in Manchester and her maternal grandfather, Harold Ingram, made wooden boxes before becoming a toolmaker in and around Manchester.
In the various interviews Rayner has given over the past decade or so, she seems to have pulled no punches when it comes to discussing her personal life, explaining with candour that her childhood was materially deprived and emotionally fractured. Although her parents each listed an occupation on their marriage certificate in 1977, and despite her father changing his profession to ‘warehouseman’ at the time of their youngest child’s birth five years after that, Rayner has never publicly suggested that either of them held down 3a steady job when she was a girl. Instead, she has been open about the fact that the family lived in council-owned properties and relied on welfare payments and Giro cheques. As to the lack of love and support shown to her by her parents, which she has also discussed in some depth, she has always maintained that their complicated personalities, the explosive nature of their marital relationship, and their own bleak childhoods meant they were not in the habit of indulging their own children with so much as a hug or a kiss. As she told Times Radio in September 2021: ‘I’m sure my parents loved me, but they didn’t know how to show they loved me. It was implied that you didn’t get cuddles.’1
Rayner has also acknowledged that her mother was raised in what sound like even more difficult circumstances than she herself endured. In Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, it is fair to say that poverty bore a stronger link to what had been suffered during the Victorian era than many people today might imagine, and Rayner’s mother apparently lived through the worst of it. She was one of twelve children and grew up on a housing estate in Wythenshawe, just south of Manchester. Two of her siblings were simply ‘given away’ to a neighbouring Christian couple, according to Rayner, presumably because they could not be cared for. By the age of twelve, Rayner’s mother had dropped out of school having never learnt how to read or write. She also suffers from bipolar disorder. Formerly known as manic depression, this condition of extreme mood swings can strike anybody at any time, though it is often believed to manifest itself first in those aged fifteen to twenty.
Less is known of Rayner’s father’s early life, but Rayner has revealed that the foundations of her parents’ marriage were shaky from the start. ‘One of the stories was that he got with my mum because the person who was the love of his life ran off with somebody else 4and he knew my mum would never leave him,’ Rayner explained to the BBC in 2017.2 Her father was not an easy man to live with, according to Rayner. She has spoken many times of his quick temper, his disciplinarian nature and his habit of shouting menacingly. In October 2023, a Guardian interviewer even reported for the first time that her father ‘scared her so much she would wet the bed’.3 She has also indicated that it was not unusual for him to be absent from home without explanation. Others who contributed to this book but who did not wish to be identified claimed that, during her childhood, Rayner’s father was ‘a ducker and a diver’ who dabbled in various moneymaking schemes, including driving a taxi. But he is said to have paid little attention to her mother and shown scant interest in helping her to deal with her mental health problems. Politics was not a feature of the household, but Rayner has recalled that, although her father read the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror regularly, he also had instincts that are more often associated with the political right. She told Nick Robinson of the BBC in 2018: ‘I used to have a phrase: “council house Tory”. My dad was one.’ She then went on to point out what she considers to be the irony of her father having railed against ‘scroungers’ when he was himself a recipient of regular welfare payments.4
In fact, the MP for Stockport between 1983 and 1992 was Tony Favell, a Conservative who was also an ardent Thatcherite. It is impossible to know whether his status as the town’s elected representative at Westminster, or whether any of the policies pursued by Mrs Thatcher’s governments, played any part in shaping Martyn Bowen’s opinions. Favell, however, who retains a link to the area via his presidency of the Stockport Conservative Association, says that he can recall canvassing for re-election in 1987 and being surprised by the depth of support there for his party: 5
I remember going to a terraced house in a working-class area in Stockport and a man answered the door and said: ‘I’m going to vote for you.’ When I asked him why, he said: ‘I can’t bear the woman [Margaret Thatcher], but she’s right.’ It made me realise that my own party underestimates the nous of the British electorate,
says Favell. He adds: ‘Knowing the kind of situation that Angela Rayner was brought up in, I think what she’s achieved is remarkable and I applaud it, whilst regretting her failure to change her political outlook.’ Stockport, incidentally, did change its political outlook, and has been represented by Labour MPs since 1992.
Stockport is one of the ten metropolitan districts that make up Greater Manchester. It lies about six miles south-east of Manchester city centre. Like many towns in Britain, it has a proud industrial past, in its case thanks to being on the canal network and having strong links to the nineteenth-century textile industry. Indeed, it became famous around the world as a centre for hat-making. Yet the poverty of some of its inhabitants has long been acknowledged. In his 1845 book The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels wrote of Stockport being ‘renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes’, going on to say that it ‘looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent’. He added that he found the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working class there ‘repulsive’.5
As the textile industry declined during the twentieth century, Stockport reinvented itself. However, if the Community Care Plan report produced by Stockport’s social services division in October 1991 is to be believed, it did so with mixed success. Using statistics stretching back to the early 1980s, this report acts as a useful outline of the town’s prospects during Rayner’s formative years. 6
It stated that by the early 1990s, the borough’s population was steady at about 290,000, with a ‘relatively low’ number of ethnic minority residents. ‘Within Stockport, wards vary greatly in their social group composition and there are areas where residents experience considerable socio-economic deprivation,’ it noted.
Several localities (eg Adswood) are contained within more affluent wards and their degree of deprivation thus obscured. Cale Green, Edgeley and South Reddish together with Brinnington are the most deprived in the Borough. Economic and social problem areas tend to be clustered around the town centre and are mostly contained in Brinnington, South Reddish, Edgeley, Manor and Cale Green.
The report also asserted that Stockport had ‘relatively good quality housing stock compared with the rest of the region’; an acceptable communication and transport network; a strong services sector; and decent electronics, plastics, engineering, printing and foodstuffs businesses. In September 1991 its average unemployment level stood at 6.5 per cent – 2 per cent below the national rate – though in its most depressed areas such as Brinnington, the figure was getting on for three times higher than that.
At the time of Rayner’s birth in 1980, her parents and brother lived at 108 Bangor Street, a two-bedroom mid-terrace council house in South Reddish, one of those areas considered to be ‘most deprived’. By 1982, the family had moved to 46 Alvanley Crescent, a three-bedroom semi-detached house on the Bridgehall housing estate less than a mile south-west of the town centre. Built in the 1930s on former farmland and situated between two more of Stockport’s most disadvantaged areas, Adswood and Edgeley, this 7estate was apparently scarred by antisocial and criminal behaviour throughout Rayner’s childhood, so much so that the police maintained a regular presence there.
Doreen Cartwright is a well-known figure on the Bridgehall estate, where she has worked in a grocery store, as a school caretaker and as a dinner lady since she and her late husband moved there in 1968 and brought up four sons. ‘I’ve also worked as a machinist and I had a veg stall in the market,’ Mrs Cartwright says. ‘My husband was in the Merchant Navy and when he left that he worked as a painter and decorator. There was work if you wanted it.’
Mrs Cartwright accepts that in the many years she has lived on Bridgehall it has had its peaks and troughs, but she maintains that there were even worse estates in Stockport. ‘It was a nice place in those early days,’ she says.
Our house was not brand new, as the first homes were built here about thirty years before. Things started to change when they built more homes. At its worst, probably in the 1980s and early 1990s, there were certain families who terrorised the whole estate. There were a lot of assaults, some quite serious, and shop windows being put in. The police got involved and slowly they squeezed those troublemakers and things got better again. It has never been that bad, though. Here has never been anything like [the nearby] Gorsey Bank estate. That place was notorious.
At the time of writing, Mrs Cartwright is eighty years old and she says she remembers Rayner’s family.
I knew her mother, Lynne, as she used to come in the grocery shop where I worked. People around here used to refer to her as 8‘Persil White’, after the washing powder, because, not to put too fine a point on it, she was never very clean. None of them were. It was a bit unkind. But let’s be honest, a bit of soap and water doesn’t cost very much. Angela and her brother and sister were always a bit scruffy and dirty, even for round here.
She adds:
Lynne might not have been able to read or write, but she could certainly count her pennies. She was pleasant enough. I don’t remember her ever working, but there were a lot of people in the same boat. I knew of Angie by sight, but I can’t say I knew any of the Bowens very well. They tended to keep themselves to themselves.
By 1986, Rayner’s family had moved again, this time to 23 Baguley Crescent, a slightly larger semi-detached house two streets away on the Bridgehall estate. Life at home was far from comfortable, according to Rayner. She has spoken of the house’s threadbare carpets exposing its concrete floors and said it was usually very untidy, a chaotic situation worsened by the fact that her parents bred German Shepherd dogs, which tend to shed their coats year-round. Not only was the house invariably a mess, but, Rayner has said, it was cold, too; her parents could not afford to pay the bills generated by their immersion heater.
It is difficult, almost forty years later, to estimate what the family survived on financially at this time. For one thing, their circumstances were unique to them and would have been strictly private in any case. However, thanks to figures quoted in a parliamentary speech given in June 1985 by Norman Fowler, the Secretary of State 9for Health and Social Services, it is possible to establish how much money from the state was potentially available to those families in need of it. In his speech, Fowler said that from November 1985, the basic rate of unemployment benefit would increase to £49.25 per week for a couple. The supplementary benefit excluding housing costs – which were met separately through housing benefit – was increased to between £47.85 and £60 per week for a couple. Payments of £10.10 per week for each child under eleven were also available. And people could apply for extra weekly payments to cover items such as heating and special diets if required.6 It is therefore conceivable that by the time they had moved to 23 Baguley Crescent, this family of five could expect approximately £150 per week on top of their housing benefit, assuming neither of Rayner’s parents had a job. That would equate to about £7,000 per year. Rayner told Times Radio in 2021 that her family was in many ways fortunate compared with anybody in their position in the twenty-first century: ‘We didn’t have money, and yes by today’s standards we had a council house and we had a Giro that covered [us],’ she said. ‘So by today’s standards actually we were ok, because the welfare state supported us.’7
Hunger was a problem for Rayner, for she has said consistently that her mother’s abilities in the kitchen were negligible. She has also explained that her mother’s illiteracy made for some memorable meals, including one occasion when her mother mistook a can of shaving foam for whipped cream because she couldn’t read its label, and another when she served dog meat thinking it was stewing steak. She has often spoken of feeling hungry as a child.
In Lynne Bowen’s defence, it should be noted that in other interviews Rayner has admitted that her mother was not entirely without domestic skills. Indeed, in 2017, for example, Rayner told the Huffington Post that her mother’s culinary competence had been 10vital to ensuring that she and her two siblings were not pushed into the care system. ‘My mum did a cookery course at adult learning,’ Rayner said.
She wouldn’t have been able to cook for us had she not done that course. What value do you put on that? I was able to stay within my parents’ home, which is better for young people rather than being in looked-after care, as well as the cost of putting me in looked-after care. Actually the fact that my mum was able to do a cookery course was tremendous for us as children because my mum was able to cook Tatty Hash, as we called it, and things like that – potatoes and corned beef and gravy.
She returned to this theme two years later when speaking to students at Oldham Sixth Form College, telling them:
My mum did a cookery course. If she hadn’t have done that cookery course I would have probably gone into care because my mum couldn’t cook … If she hadn’t have had that opportunity then we probably would have ended up in care and I probably wouldn’t have thanked the state for it.
According to Rayner, her life outside of home was no easier than it was in it, but she felt compelled to take to the street nonetheless. She told the BBC in 2017:
We’d go out all the day to avoid being in the house because there would be shouting or something so we’d be frightened as kids to stick around. I’d go out on the street on the estate. The in-crowd kids would beat me up. And then if I went home and told my dad 11I’d been beaten up, he’d tell me off, ground me and smack me for being so weak and allowing [myself] to be beaten up. So it was pretty tough at times.8
Fortunately for Rayner, there were some stabilising influences to help keep her on a smoother path. All four of her grandparents – and, indeed, her great-grandmother, Mary Bowen – were alive at the time of her birth and living either in Stockport or close by. At least one of them, her paternal grandmother, Jean, was a figure from that generation who was a mainstay in her life and that of her siblings. From the earliest stages of her political career, Rayner has acknowledged the kindness and love shown to her by Jean, whom she refers to as her ‘nana’, even telling prospective voters on her official website in 2014 when she first became a Labour candidate: ‘For the most part, I was raised by my Grandma who worked at three jobs to put food on the table.’9
She has explained in interviews that Jean would help to buy and wash their clothes. She, her siblings and their mother would also go to Jean’s high-rise flat, No. 11 Pendlebury Towers and, latterly, 77 Millbrook Towers, each weekend for lunch and to have a bath, taking it in turns with the eldest child going first.10
Jean would also help to look after Rayner’s mother when necessary. Sadly, her mother’s bipolar disorder meant that her behaviour became increasingly unpredictable as Rayner grew up. Owing to Rayner’s father’s absences, Rayner has said that she was frequently left to attend to her needs, including bathing her. ‘By the age of ten, I became my mum’s main carer,’ she told the BBC of this role reversal in 2017.
I became the adult … she’s been in and out of psychiatric care. I 12remember at ten my mum being suicidal and me sleeping like a dog on the end of her bed just to try and stay next to her so she didn’t do any harm to herself.11
As well as having to help Rayner’s mother, Jean’s own life was not straightforward and was ultimately blighted by tragedy. Having divorced her first husband, Thomas Bowen, she married a widower, Harold Towers, in 1985. Mr Towers therefore became Rayner’s step-grandfather. According to a report from the Manchester Evening News published in May 1987, he crashed his Hillman Avenger into a parked Mercedes in Newbridge Lane in Stockport that month. His car overturned, exploded, and witnesses were powerless to help as he burned to death. He was fifty-nine and, according to his death notice in the Manchester Evening News, he had ten children.
By this point, Rayner was a pupil at Bridge Hall primary school, which was a short walk from her front door. In adulthood, she has concluded that being brought up in a house that contained no books (she had never even been read a bedtime story) meant she was not ready for school when she first went there. As a result, she did not progress academically. ‘Apparently, my mum said that I needed speech and language therapy as well,’ she told LBC’s James O’Brien in 2021. ‘There’s a reason why I’ve got a lisp, thank you very much.’ She added that her reading and social skills were less well-developed than those of her peers.12
Even if she did not take to school easily, however, there were, mercifully, other pursuits laid on by members of the community that must have acted as a much-needed distraction and in which she is said to have shown a great interest. For example, the Girl Guides was a big part of her life for several years. Kathleen Potts, who was ninety at the time she gave an interview for the purposes 13of this book, was the leader of No. 9 Stockport Girl Guides, better known as the St Mark’s, Edgeley unit. Everyone called her ‘Captain’. She remembers Rayner as an earnest child who joined the troop in 1990, when she was ten years old, and who remained a member of it for about three years. ‘She was a pretty little girl with the most glorious head of red hair,’ says Mrs Potts.
She was never a nuisance and was unfailingly polite towards me. In fact, if any of the other girls were being a bit naughty she would put them right. Guiding is not about girls who are badly behaved. It’s about girls who come in the right spirit, behave and want to learn and do new things.
Mrs Potts knew at the time that Rayner’s background was complicated but adds: ‘That was not unusual to us.’ She goes on:
One of the first things I remember learning from her was that her mother could not read and write. Nobody ever mentioned anything about her father and clearly she was the one looking after her mum. I would often take Angie home and not once did I ever meet her mum. You would have expected her to at least come to the door, to wave or have a word. I don’t think she was capable of social interaction. Lynne didn’t understand things very well. In fact, I think Angie had to explain everything for her. I think she would be called special educational needs these days. That probably explains why Angie was so mature for her years. I remember she had an older brother and a younger sister. She seemed to look after all of them. She didn’t really have a childhood.
She says: 14
We would meet every Thursday at St Mark’s church hall in Edgeley and Angie would walk across from Bridgehall either on her own or with other members of the unit who were coming. I think she loved it. She would throw herself into the community work we did, and the first aid courses. Once a month we would go on church parade and she would come to that regularly. There was also the Remembrance Parade once a year, and something she said after her first one stuck in my mind. We would march to the war memorial and stand in silence, making the Guide salute for three minutes. Being able to stand still without talking for that length of time is quite a challenge for young girls, and Angie said it was the longest three minutes of the year for her.
Mrs Potts goes on to say that on a couple of occasions the troop went on trips to the Peak District, where they stayed in a house in the High Peaks between Chinley and Castleton. ‘Angie could not afford it, so we paid for her,’ she explains.
Given the length of time that Rayner was a Girl Guide, it is surprising that when describing her undeniably challenging past she has never chosen to speak about her involvement in this positive extracurricular activity. It is quite clear from Mrs Potts’s well-stocked bank of memories that she believes the Girl Guides brought out the best in Rayner by helping to forge her strong personality, her willingness to learn, to say nothing of a range of practical skills. Regrettably, it seems as though the negative aspects of Rayner’s childhood dominate her thoughts even today, to such a degree that the Girl Guides has been overlooked when she speaks of her past. As she told Times Radio in 2021: ‘The abuse, the neglect, the circumstances of my childhood – I grew up thinking that’s normal.’13 Her teenage years were to prove no less demanding.
NOTES
1 ‘What I Wish I’d Known: Angela Rayner’, Times Radio, 27 September 2021, available at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/podcasts/what-i-wish-id-known
2 ‘At Lunch with… Angela Rayner MP’, BBC Sounds, 17 October 2017, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p05k6qns
3 Kiran Stacey and Pippa Crerar, ‘“I love campaigning – it’s like playtime”: Angela Rayner on her rising appeal’, The Guardian, 6 October 2023, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/06/i-love-campaigning-its-like-playtime-angela-rayner-on-her-rising-appeal
4 ‘Political Thinking with Nick Robinson: The Angela Rayner One’, BBC Sounds, 18 May 2018, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p067kbxv
5 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with preface written in 1892, translated by Florence Kelly, (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892)
6 Hansard, HC debate, 18 June 1985, vol. 81, cols 169–83
7 Times Radio, 2021
8 BBC Sounds, 2017
9 ‘Grangela: Labour’s Angela Rayner is grandmother at 37’, BBC News, 22 November 2017, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42078457
10 ‘Full Disclosure with James O’Brien: Angela Rayner’, Global, 23 September 2021, available at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/angela-rayner/id1454408831?i=1000536441288
11 BBC Sounds, 2017
12 Global, 2021
13 Times Radio, 2021
Chapter 2
Little Shadow
In September 1991, aged eleven, Rayner began her first term at Avondale School, a comprehensive in Cheadle Heath about a mile from her house in Baguley Crescent, on the Bridgehall estate. Since entering Parliament, Rayner has been characteristically upfront about this period of her life, never trying to disguise the fact that she did not succeed academically and offering a host of reasons as to why this might be so. In July 2017, for example, she told The Guardian that she felt the disarray in which she was brought up guaranteed that she faced problems when it came to her schooling. She explained: ‘School was the place where I hung about with my mates and got a meal. My mum didn’t understand that education was an important thing. She couldn’t do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff.’1
There is no question that her mother’s lack of formal education and history of psychological disturbance would have had a profound effect on Rayner, so it is unsurprising that she believes these disadvantages hampered her own chances in the classroom. Indeed, some might conclude that when her complicated upbringing is considered, it was almost inevitable that she would not thrive 16academically. She even told The Observer in September 2019 that instead of leaving school aged sixteen like most of her contemporaries, she effectively dropped out a year early. ‘My school, we affectionately nicknamed it Avonjail, but it was called Avondale, Avondale High School in Stockport. I left with no GCSEs above a D. I kind of left at 15,’ she told the newspaper.2 She has also suggested that it was an inadequate place, giving the impression that her own chances of doing well there were lower still. Proof of this comes from a talk she gave to students at Oldham Sixth Form College in March 2019, in which she remarked: ‘My school was a failing school. And I was a failing pupil. But look at me – I’m sat here as one of the most successful female politicians of my time.’
In discussing this pivotal stage of her childhood, it seems important to learn from other sources what Avondale was like generally and to hear more of Rayner’s experiences there. Given her understandable frustration at having left with a poor set of GCSE results, it is certainly worth exploring to what extent it is accurate for her to have described it as a ‘failing’ school during the five years that she attended it.
Anybody who has read A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines or seen Ken Loach’s 1969 film of the same story, Kes, is unlikely to forget the bleakness of the school attended by its protagonist, Billy Casper, a shy, working-class teenager from a dysfunctional South Yorkshire family who has no academic inclinations and is destined to work in a coal mine.3,4 Hines, a former teacher who, like Rayner, grew up in a house with no books, is said to have written his novel as a howl of rage against the British education system as it was organised in the 1960s. At that time those, like Billy Casper, who failed the eleven-plus exam and so did not go to a grammar school were shunted into a secondary modern school, with little or no choice as 17to which one they attended. There, they might well encounter uncaring staff members who were as interested in meting out corporal punishments as they were in teaching. While Hines’s grim interpretation of certain state schools was seen by some as having been exaggerated for effect, it is certainly true that many children who went to such institutions were effectively consigned to the scrap heap at an appallingly young age.
Fortunately for Rayner, by the comparatively more enlightened 1990s most state secondary schools could not be accused of operating along such brutal lines. Thanks to national education reforms in 1980 and 1988, parents throughout Britain were given greater freedom than had existed before to decide which school their child entered. This was intended to create a sense of competition, which, it was hoped, might raise standards. One aspiration was that the element of parental choice would convince mothers and fathers to take a more active interest in their child’s education, helping to usher in a positive environment for the wider community.
Avondale High School was a coeducational, non-selective establishment for pupils aged eleven to sixteen. It had been founded in September 1940 and by 1991, when Rayner arrived, it occupied two neighbouring sites in Stockport – one adjoining Avondale Road and St Lesmo Road; the other off Heathbank Road. This second site included a modern recreation centre that boasted a 25-metre swimming pool, a sports hall and an all-weather games pitch. It was the only school in Stockport with such facilities. Records show that 626 pupils were on the school roll during Rayner’s first term, making it relatively small when measured against other urban comprehensives. It was split into a Lower School, consisting of those in their first two years, and an Upper School, catering for those in their final three years. Pupils received twenty-five hours of tuition per 18week and were streamed in Maths, English, History and Modern Languages during their second and third years before preparing for GCSEs and other public exams in their final two years. The school’s social make-up when Rayner arrived at Avondale can be better understood by considering the lunch that was on offer to pupils each day. It cost less than £1 per person to buy and was served in the school canteen. According to an Ofsted report dating from 1994 – two years before Rayner left – 39 per cent of pupils were entitled to this meal free of charge because of low parental income and were given a token to cover the expense. All pupils were allowed to go home to eat lunch if they preferred.
Under Ian Tunnard, the headmaster of Avondale throughout Rayner’s tenure, an ethos of focussing on the value of people as individuals was very much at the fore. Pastoral care was taken seriously as well, with a tutor assigned to oversee the academic, social and personal development of each girl and boy. Reflecting Tunnard’s respect for traditional teaching methods, discipline was paramount. He knew the name of every pupil in the school and they were all expected to wear a uniform. He also tried to keep a tight grip on bullying, truancy and antisocial behaviour. He made a point of actively recruiting new parents as a way of lifting the calibre of the school.
Tunnard explains that Avondale had been troubled when he became its headmaster in the late 1980s and, despite his best efforts to reinvigorate it, some problems were harder to overcome than others. Moreover, he believes that Rayner personally bore the brunt of some of these difficulties.
‘When I arrived in January 1989, Avondale was the smallest school in Stockport because no one wanted their children to go there,’ remembers the now-retired headmaster. 19
I probably didn’t realise before my appointment just how poor its reputation was. In those early days, I would drive in to work past bus stops thronged with children in my catchment all waiting to get on the bus to another school away from the area where they lived. A local councillor spoke out and challenged me to deal with all the issues, the bullying, the bad behaviour, and in my first two years there I did my best to turn it around with the help of some very able deputies. I made it clear the school was under new management.
One of the first things to be introduced in 1989 was what were known as ‘warning’ assemblies. These were the idea of Tunnard’s deputy, Beth Mottram, who was already in post when he took over. ‘We got them in and told them the way things were going to be,’ says Tunnard.
We told those children their behaviour in the past had not been acceptable and it was going to improve. I remember I probably overstepped the mark, because I told them that otherwise I was going to cancel Christmas. Those pupils knew what to expect from me, though, and my staff knew too. I always tried to make Avondale as pleasant a place as possible. My door was literally and metaphorically always open. I tried to be a constant presence. I was straight talking. I would not pull my punches and I was not afraid to permanently exclude those who clearly were never going to change their ways and were ruining our chance to educate others. I would visit parents in their own home if necessary.
Tunnard says that neither he nor Rayner has ever discussed publicly the important role he played in her school career before now, 20but he has strong recollections of her that have nothing to do with her subsequent political prominence or, indeed, with her academic performance in the 1990s. Poignantly, when talking about her as a schoolgirl he refers to her as a ‘little shadow’, because she was a semi-permanent fixture by his side during lunch and break times, particularly, he believes, from when she was thirteen or fourteen years old. The reason for this was that she needed to be protected from other children. ‘Things were difficult for her,’ he recalls.
She was bullied. She came to tell me, though, and I gave her a place of safety. I wasn’t aware who I was protecting her from. She never told me that. Professionally you would have wanted to know, but I understood why children wouldn’t always want to disclose information like that. In her case, there was a very real possibility that she would have had to walk home with those same protagonists, and I wouldn’t be there to protect her then. I could not make sure she was safe around the clock. She was clearly vulnerable, because she came from a very difficult, deprived background.
Tunnard’s plea for parents to participate more fully in the school did not always generate the results he sought. Some didn’t even bother to attend parents’ evenings. He says he can remember one such event when thirty-eight members of staff were present, but only about twenty parents turned up. ‘I wrote to every single one of the parents who did not come asking what possible excuse they could have for not putting their child’s education first. Some of the excuses they gave were absolutely pathetic,’ he says. Rayner’s parents were in this camp.
I never met her father, Martyn. From what I recall I don’t even 21remember him being on the scene at all. I knew her mother was Lynne, although I never met her either and I heard she was trying to hold things together on her own. I have no memory of her brother or sister, either. The Bowens were not a difficult family as such. Some families are like that – they almost slip under the radar, in a manner of speaking. Others were etched on your memory. I could give you the names of families who had been problematic on the Bridgehall estate before I got there, while I was there and I bet some of them still are today. Angela was probably what you could call a loner in school.
Rayner has spoken frankly of her instinct to keep a low profile as a child, not helped by her belief that she was ‘ugly’ and an ‘outcast’. Despite her hitherto unknown reliance on Ian Tunnard’s protection, she has also said she was wary of authority figures such as teachers – certainly when it came to discussing her home life with them. She has said that when growing up she saw such people as the ‘enemy’.5 This arguably makes it all the more notable that she turned to Tunnard for help, if his recollection is accurate.
In 2021 she told LBC’s James O’Brien that Sue Travis, her English teacher, was conspicuous as an adult in a position of power who took the trouble to try to help her, once staying behind after school hours to work on what Rayner has described as her ‘dreadful’ spelling.6 But she has never had much, if anything, to say about Avondale or any other members of its staff that is favourable, least of all her apparent defender, Ian Tunnard. Instead, she has spoken about being persecuted by others, both at school and on the Bridgehall estate, maintaining that her ginger hair made her a target, as did her footwear. ‘I never got a brand-new pair of shoes when I was a kid,’ she told Nick Robinson of the BBC in May 2018. ‘My nana got me 22a pair of steel toe caps because she said they’ll last longer at school and I got absolutely bullied from it when I was younger.’7
While she and Tunnard may have similar recollections of the intimidation she experienced there, her description of Avondale as a ‘failing school’ – as she claimed when speaking at Oldham Sixth Form College in 2019 – may have been something of an exaggeration. Ian Tunnard certainly believes that the various changes implemented by him over several years successfully boosted academic results across the school. ‘When I arrived, the percentage of children obtaining five A to Cs in their GCSEs was about 10 to 15 per cent,’ he says. ‘By 1994, that was well into the thirties.’ This sense of advancement is borne out by a relatively positive Ofsted inspection report that was published in May 1994, the year that Avondale switched to operating from just one site at Heathbank Road. It described Avondale as ‘a caring, happy school which makes good provision for its pupils.’ It went on: ‘The school enjoys the confidence and esteem of its parents. Strong pastoral support for pupils and good behaviour contribute directly to learning. This is a school in which the community can show justified pride.’ It acknowledged that a ‘majority of pupils achieve standards generally below national norms in public examinations’ but detailed year-on-year improvements. It noted the school’s ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum and paid tribute to the ‘excellent extracurricular activities, drama and personal and social education [that] extend the curriculum provision’. Tunnard’s ‘strong leadership’ was highly praised, painting an overall picture of a well-run school that provided ‘good value for money’.
Furthermore, according to a report in the Manchester Evening News the following year, Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools in England, singled out Avondale High School and another school in the north-west, Hazel Grove High School, complimenting 23the teachers for their ‘vision, commitment and expertise’ and for the way they had achieved improvements in the performance of their schools. Nowhere in Ofsted’s 1994 report does the word ‘failing’ appear and it is hard to believe that by the time Rayner left Avondale in 1996, standards had suddenly plummeted. Certainly the subsequent Ofsted report, published in November 1998, two years after Rayner left, made no mention of any overall decline.
Tunnard’s experience of Rayner during this phase of her school career may have been of a meek girl, but as an MP she has often spoken of her wayward tendencies, first hanging around at the local bus station and sometimes catching a bus for fun to Manchester Airport with a friend, before giving in to the temptations of Manchester city centre. Far from being a ‘little shadow’, to use Tunnard’s phrase, Rayner has explained that out of school she was something of a wild child from the age of thirteen, talking of how she frequented nightclubs in order to spend time with members of the opposite sex, many of whom were older than her.
In May 2018 she told Nick Robinson of the BBC that because she looked mature for her years she was able to get into nightclubs including the Hacienda, Sankeys Soap and 21 Piccadilly’s.8 And in 2018 when a journalist called Linda McDougall interviewed her for a book of political profiles, The Honourable Ladies, Rayner was quoted as saying that as a schoolgirl ‘I was already going out clubbing meeting men – not boys, men – and being out with my friends. I was quite feral. I use that term deliberately.’9 In September 2020, she told Cathy Newman of Times Radio:
Certainly by the age of thirteen, fourteen, I’d decided that it was much more fun to be involved in the Manchester music scene and going out and having fun. I looked a lot older as well and I was 24more mature because of my life experience. I used to go out with people who were a lot older than me and go to clubs in Manchester and things like that and I was a bit of a rebel.10
