Angela Rayner may have resigned in disgrace from the Cabinet – but her spirit is stalking this conference.
Panicking party bosses had hastily pulped this year’s glossy brochure for the Liverpool jamboree, as it had featured a lengthy contribution from the former Deputy Prime Minister.
As readers will remember, Rayner was ousted earlier this month amid a storm of controversy over her failure to pay £40,000 stamp duty on the purchase of a luxury seaside second home.
The 45-year-old, who was Housing Secretary as well as the Deputy Labour Leader, had claimed to HMRC that the £800,000 flat in Hove was her principal residence. The Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, later found she had breached the ministerial code.
Like Stalin’s propagandists, who airbrushed ‘enemies of the Soviet people’ from photos with the Dear Leader, Labour apparatchiks had tried to purge La Rayner from party literature, which had been printed before her dismissal.
Despite their best efforts, however, I have managed to track down one of the banned guides to the four-day event.
Here are the photograph and text you were never meant to see.
Under the headline, ‘Welcome to conference’, Rayner had prematurely boasted: ‘It is an honour to welcome you as your Deputy Leader and Deputy Prime Minister.’
Over two pages, she tacitly acknowledges the disappointments of Labour’s first year in office: ‘No one can wave a magic wand and bring change overnight.’
And in the most exquisite irony of all for a woman so curtly defenestrated by the party, she waxes lyrical about unity, promising: ‘This week, we will show how Labour is working together to bring national renewal.’
Labour’s official conference guide features a beaming Angela Rayner urging party members to have a ‘brilliant’ time in Liverpool… despite her having quit weeks ago
Very few copies of this brochure have survived, and the ones that have are sure to become collector’s items. Some enterprising party activists are even rumoured to be planning to auction them on eBay.
In the end, this week’s conference brochure had to be published online. Its sixth and seventh pages – which had featured Rayner – now show listings for events organised by Labour Together, a centre-Left think-tank.
But even that has caused fresh embarrassment. Labour Together is, of course, mired in controversy after Keir Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney failed to declare £740,000 of undeclared donations during his 2020 leadership bid.
The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner is considering whether to mount an investigation into the allegation that the PM, that self-styled bastion of probity and moral rectitude, broke the MPs’ code of conduct when he failed to declare the lavish support from this shady outfit.
In a sign of the chaotic last-minute changes to the conference brochure, the published timetable, which is now on the 11th page – still incorrectly shows page number 13.
It also promises a speech from the ‘Deputy Leader of the Labour Party’, despite the fact that the contest to replace Ms Rayner is ongoing.
One senior Labour MP is mortified that the printed guide is still circulating.
‘Ange is very popular, but her talk of “Labour values” will be played back at us over the tax issues. I’m also not sure in hindsight that replacing Angela Rayner with a guide which underlines the influence of Labour Together is going to do us much good, either.’
And though Rayner may have stayed away from Liverpool this week, when she was given a name-check by her successor as Housing Secretary Steve Reed, it generated the biggest cheer and round of applause so far.
The flame-haired firebrand remains a powerful presence.
