Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, is a remarkable product of British social mobility, the beneficiary of not one but two signature policies: Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy, and Tony Blair’s Sure Start. She is on the threshold of high cabinet office, having overcome a difficult start in life.
She left school, pregnant, at 16. She learned to care for her son partly thanks to Sure Start, the early years support programme set up by Labour in 1998, got a job as a care worker, bought her council flat and built a blended family while rising as a trade union official to become an MP.
On entering parliament in 2015, she rose through the opposition ranks with dizzying speed, through a combination of luck and evident ability. When Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader cleared out shadow ministers, she became shadow education secretary in 2016. It was a huge promotion, which she handled with fearless skill, deploying her educational background to tilt policy away from the traditional focus on A-levels and graduates.
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