Chapter 1
A familiar complaint made of Westminster’s MPs by some voters has been that too few of them have truly working-class origins and too many of them have insufficient experience of ‘real life’. Instead, it is claimed, a disproportionately high number of Britain’s elected representatives have rolled off what is in effect a production line limited to just three phases: after leaving university they work for a politician or party; eventually they are parachuted or otherwise helped into a winnable parliamentary seat to contest themselves; and finally they take their place in the House of Commons, having barely broken into a sweat. It has been said that the prevalence of this cycle has further damaged the link between everyday people and those who speak for them. There is undoubtedly some truth in this idea. In the post-war years more parliamentarians – particularly on the Labour benches – were likelier to have walked one of various hard roads before seeking national office, thereby insulating them from accusations of belonging to a remote political class. Since the 1990s, however, the backgrounds of many MPs have become more uniform, perhaps as a consequence of deindustrialisation and the expansion of tertiary education. Inevitably, though, there are exceptions to the new rules. In 2024 it is generally agreed that Angela Rayner’s tough upbringing makes her the most prominent example of a politician who has overcome a variety of challenges to reach the top of a political party without having enjoyed the start in life that most people might assume is necessary.
Angela Rayner was born Angela Bowen at the Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport on 28 March 1980. Her father, Martyn, married her mother, Lynne Ingram, in Stockport Register Office in June 1977 when he was a 21-year-old storeman and she was an eighteen-year-old bookbinder. At the time of Rayner’s birth, they already had a son, Darren, who was born in 1978. A younger sibling, Tracey, was born on Christmas Day in 1982. Both the Bowen and Ingram families hailed from the north-west of England, and according to census records they had been involved in manual labour and skilled trade there for generations. Tracing Rayner’s paternal line back to the beginning of the twentieth century reveals that her great-grandfather, Thomas Bowen, was a printer in Stockport. Her grandfather, who was also called Thomas Bowen, was a machine operator in the same town. On Rayner’s mother’s side, her great-grandfather, Oliver Ingram, was a wire weaver in Manchester and her maternal grandfather, Harold Ingram, made wooden boxes before becoming a toolmaker in and around Manchester.
In the various interviews Rayner has given over the past decade or so, she seems to have pulled no punches when it comes to discussing her personal life, explaining with candour that her childhood was materially deprived and emotionally fractured. Although her parents each listed an occupation on their marriage certificate in 1977, and despite her father changing his profession to ‘warehouseman’ at the time of their youngest child’s birth five years aft
