Why it’s not too soon for Rayner to write a memoir

Angela Rayner is reportedly in talks with a publisher about a memoir. Even after her resignation as deputy prime minister and party leader, she remains a figure who attracts great interest.

Most of the chatter about Rayner asks when, not if, she will return to the political front line where her formidable skills and common sense seem badly needed. Speculation is that a book might speed her rehabilitation.

At 45 and having been an MP for a decade, her post-retirement memoirs should be a long way off yet. However, she could perhaps use an “interim autobiography” to remind people that she’s not finished yet and that she’s got ideas, born of reflection and experience that can help the Labour government and change the country for the better. It would answer afresh the question: “Why am I in politics?”

Rayner has an impressive backstory and her life experience is inspirational and obviously worth telling in its own right. It is one of overcoming the hardships of growing up in a working-class family with no privileges, becoming a mother as a teenager, and leaving school with no qualifications.

As a care worker, she’d seen public services from the other end of the Whitehall telescope, and the trade union movement helped her move into the political world, with a rise through the turbulent Corbyn years, the Starmer rebuild and the frustrations of high office.

Tony Benn used to say that no one became radicalised by reading a book but rather via their own experiences, and Rayner’s style of socialism has obviously been shaped by her own personal story. The best sort of book of this kind skillfully blends the personal and the political, and it greatly helps if the politician is a compelling writer, and preferably a journalist as well; Winston Churchill, Roy Jenkins and Roy Hattersley come to mind.

The most recent would be One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up, Wes Streeting’s account of a similarly working-class upbringing (albeit with added gangster violence). Further back, Nye Bevan’s 1952 In Place of Fear is regarded as a classic of its kind, albeit more oriented towards policy, and it helped build Bevan’s position in the party soon after his resignation from the Attlee government. Rather more ambitious, Benjamin Disraeli formulated his ideas about “One Nation” Toryism through his early novel, Sybil. Harold Macmillan’s The Middle Way (1938) and Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956) were more theoretical but serve as important guides to their later time in government.

The genre is probably more naturally American than British, though. JD Vance’s 2016 Hillbilly Elegy (also made into a film) is as good an explanation for the rise of Maga Republicanism as anything. Barack Obama (Dreams From My Father, Audacity of Hope), John McCain (Faith of My Fathers) and John F Kennedy (Profiles in Courage) are other celebrated examples. From a happier time for him, there’s also Emmanuel Macron’s Revolution to serve Rayner as inspiration. (We’ll leave Hitler and Lenin out of the democratic literary canon).

As if to prove the potential of her history, Rayner is already the subject of two biographies. Michael Ashcroft’s Red Queen? contained the controversy about her tax affairs that caused her so much trouble in the run-up to the last general election. A more admiring account of her life and times can be found in The Journey of Angela Rayner: From Care Worker to Kingmaker by Rudolph L Kelly.