Former Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove said that Angela Rayner would never play “the role of political girlfriend to Wes Streeting” to assist him win a leadership challenge because she is more likely to succeed than he is.
With rumours rife of a potential Streeting-Rayner pact to take on the Prime Minister in a leadership challenge, Lord Gove said he believed the former Deputy Prime Minister was ‘in a better position’ than Streeting to take down Sir Keir Starmer.
He also said he believed that leadership frontrunner Ed Miliband was ‘unlikely to run for leadership again’, although he is a favourite with Labour Party members in any battle for a replacement for Starmer.
The Telegraph reported that MPs close to Mr Streeting had approached Ms Rayner about the prospect of a pact.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lord Gove, now Editor of the Spectator magazine, said recent political ‘over manoeuvring’ was ‘a sure sign of decline for the Prime Minister’ and was ‘déjà vu for me when I was a Tory cabinet minister’.
Lord Gove, who served in cabinet roles across the governments of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, witnessing multiple leadership challenges, said the Health Minister had ‘done very well at the Labour Party conference by invoking Angela Rayner and praising her and also on issues like Gaza tacked a little bit to the left in order to maximise his appeal’.
But he warned: ‘I think that Wes Streeting is mistaken if he thinks that Angela Rayner is going to play essentially the role of political girlfriend to his ambitions because I actually think that Angela Rayner is in a better position than Wes Streeting to win any leadership election.
‘The idea that just because she’s had the difficulties she did over tax that she is going to meekly accept Wes Streeting as her route back to respectability – I don’t think she will accept.’
And ruling out Miliband as a leadership contender, he agreed he was way ahead in the polls but said: ‘I don’t think he would want to go for the leadership again, although he is undoubtedly very popular because he has a clear sense of mission in the role in which he occupies as Energy Secretary.’
Meanwhile, the Editor of the left-leaning New Statesman magazine, Tom McTague, said he did not think that Wes Streeting was expecting ‘Angela Rayner to lie down or let him take the crown without something of a battle’.
He said: ‘I think they are all eyeing each other quite carefully at the moment and they are not taking each other’s side.’
But he warned that it was now ‘the standard conventional wisdom of Labour MPs and Labour cabinet members’ that a leadership challenge was imminent.
He said: ‘There is a certain sense of a breakdown of order and direction in this government, so we are seeing people freelance and saying what their ideas are, and we are starting to see positioning ahead of what looks increasingly like an inevitable leadership challenge and election next year.
Angela Rayner would be a complete disaster for our nation and the end of the road for Labour; therefore, I really hope that she is not anyone’s dream candidate.
How can someone as ignorant and crass as Angela Rayner be the leader of the UK – it’s mindbending.
What a choice: Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner! They are all equally intellectually inept, and I have never detested a Prime Minister as much as this lifeless biscuit, appeasing, cowardly traitor to the UK. Someone please get him out.
Angela Rayner should never be Prime Minister; come to that, she shouldn’t even be a Member of Parliament, and the thought of her in No 10 Downing Street would provoke chaos in the streets.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 