Mixed Media #24...Angela Rayner

a story you just couldn't write

Original official portrait of Angela Rayner on the UK Parliament website, licensed by https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I DON’T want to sound self-referential, but if Angela Rayner, Shadow Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were a fictional character, she’d be perfect for The Dialectic’s series on fictional female role models, Let’s Hear It For… . Of course no one would ever come up with such a character because it’s too far-fetched. It would be a skilful fiction writer indeed who could make Angela Rayner’s story sound plausible.

Born in 1980 to a mother who could neither read nor write, Rayner was raised in poverty in a council house in Stockport. At age ten, when she heard her mentally ill mother threaten to commit suicide, she slept at the bottom of her bed to prevent her. Their roles reversed. As the eldest daughter in the family, she helped run the home. At sixteen she got pregnant and left school without qualifications, later going to college and becoming a care worker for Stockport Council. Undaunted by obstacles that many would find insurmountable, she became a union representative for the public services union UNISON, rising to the level of regional officer and, in due course, the most senior elected official in the North West of England.