Stepping out on Sunday in leopard-print boots, it is a photograph that brings new meaning to the idea that Angela Rayner is “on manoeuvres”.
The image of Labour’s deputy leader, one of its most recognisable rising stars, emerging from her south London flat with Sam Tarry, a married MP – though he has reportedly split from his wife – with what looks remarkably like a toothbrush sticking out of his coat pocket has set Westminster tongues wagging.
So much so that the power-dressing, fake-fur-loving Labour leadership hopeful is becoming positively Boris-like in her habit of hogging the headlines – and not always for the right reasons.
The 41-year-old mother-of-three might bristle at comparisons with her Dispatch Box nemesis, but the similarities are increasingly plain to see in their colourful private lives, their penchant for speaking without thinking and their star status as politicians with a populist touch.
As one Labour colleague put it: “You could say Angela is a bit like Boris in the way she trades on her big personality. Like him, she is also quite a complex character, with a complicated back story, and a USP that appeals to the party membership.”
It is no secret that straight-talking, plain-speaking Rayner has brought some much needed fizz to the Labour frontbench, providing the yin to Sir Keir Starmer’s “boring” yang, in the same way Johnson proved a relief after Theresa “Maybot”.
Little wonder, then, that in a sparky exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this month, when Rayner stood in for Sir Keir, the Prime Minister appeared to delight in joshing that the former comprehensive schoolgirl was the now the “shadow minister for the future of work”, joking: “We all know what job she wants.”
Grinning broadly, Rayner fired back: “I’ve heard on the grapevine there might be a vacancy for Prime Minister soon, so maybe I should show aspiration.”
