Angela Rayner has said an image of her vaping on a kayak in Hove last summer was “put out there to shame me” but backfired. The senior Cabinet minister made the remarks on The Mirror’s new YouTube show Sense Check, weeks after her resignation from Keir Starmer’s Cabinet.
Ms Rayner said she had been out to celebrate her youngest son’s GCSEs at the time. “I had a vape and there was an iconic picture of me,” she said. “It was a dreadful picture – but it was put out there to shame me let’s be honest right that’s what that picture was about there to say ‘look at that chav’ and to shame me.”
Public Response
She added: “The amount of people that contacted me saying I’ve never felt more represented.” Ms Rayner said the media’s attempt to attack her at that level had made her a household name. “So that’s why I’m saying... when they [the media] go low the public go high. So they’ve made me a household name because they thought that was clever to attack me at that level,” she said.
“The public were upset when they thought I’d done something like broke the rules, they weren’t upset because I’m in a kayak. I get that, I don’t need the papers to make me understand that,” she said.
“I understand the rhythm of my people who I represent, who I grew up with, I get that they’re not interested in. You know, they might have a laugh about it. That’s like small fry for them, what they’re interested in, what you’re doing for us and don’t have double standards.”
False Claims Dismissed
Ms Rayner also dismissed a front page headline – ‘Three Pads Rayner’ – joking: “Yeah, and I didn’t have three pads, either. I have a mortgage. I have a big mortgage, and, you know, probably about 20% deposit, which is my life savings.”
She added: “I see online I’m supposed to be a net worth of four million as well. I don’t know where that is. I definitely don’t have that. But I do recognise now that my circumstances now are very different to the circumstances I grew up in.”
Ms Rayner, who grew up on a council estate in Greater Manchester in poverty before rising through the ranks of the union and Labour movement, said the feeling of not being able to pay a bill never leaves you. “I can pay my energy bills. I don’t have loads of money at the end of the month... but I do live OK. But I know when I was growing up, and when I was at that point as a teenage mum,” she said.
Cost of Living Sympathy
“I know that gut-wrenching feeling when your kid’s shoes are knackered and you need to buy a new pair of shoes and you’ve just got no money. You can’t even afford to pay bills. I know how that feels for people and that never leaves you,” she said.
The senior Cabinet minister added: “So, I do have this sympathy for people at the moment with the cost of living and what’s going on for them, and I know how lucky and fortunate I am compared to a lot of people.”
“My poverty was a poverty where my parents were on welfare and I was a free school meals kid. But the poverty that people are facing in Britain today are working people. It is people who have got good jobs, people who are working multiple jobs, and still can’t afford to live, because of the costs have gone up and wages haven’t gone up to meet those costs,” she said.
