LONDON – Angela Rayner’s thinly disguised ambition to succeed Sir Keir Starmer has become a matter of location, location, location, and the location in question is a Commons constituency she can win at the next General Election.
For although Rayner has a clear advantage over one of her chief rivals for the Labour crown, Andy Burnham, by already having a seat, that looks set to change.
On current polling projections, her Ashton-under-Lyne Constituency will fall to Nigel Farage’s Reform – along with hundreds of other Commons seats. If a general election was held tomorrow, Reform is predicted to win 348 seats and Labour just 161 (the Tories would be on an extinction-level 14).
So, before she can decide how to win a Labour leadership contest, the former deputy prime minister must first secure her long-term future at Westminster.
That will very likely require a so-called ‘chicken run’ – a not exactly dignified but necessary dash to a seat that would survive the Reform tsunami.
For professional Northerner Rayner, that will probably involve heading ‘down South’ to where many of those still winnable Labour seats are clustered – and where the Greens and Liberal Democrats are the main opposition, not Reform.
Hove, where Rayner has just bought an £800 000 seaside flat, is one such location.
The purchase proved to be her undoing when she failed to pay the right amount of stamp duty and had to leave Cabinet under a cloud, but it did not put paid to her future leadership ambitions.
Labour insiders claim she has eyes on replacing Hove MP Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, who would be persuaded to depart for a seat in the House of Lords. At the last election, Kyle chalked up a very comfortable majority of 19 791 over the Green Party and with Reform in fourth place.
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