Is former deputy PM Rayner planning her comeback?

Keir Starmer will have noted one moment at Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool. When Wes Streeting, the health secretary, paid tribute to Angela Rayner and said, “We need her back,” the roar of approval in the hall sounded like an echo from the future. The former deputy prime minister has been quiet since her resignation on 5 September, but now she is going to find her voice again. She intends to exercise her right to make a resignation statement in the House of Commons next week. “Rayner is incapable of being boring and probably has a lot to say,” commented The New Statesman, which broke the news.

Which is true, although resignation statements in parliament have been overvalued since Geoffrey Howe’s historic “broken cricket bats” in 1990, which lit the fuse for the ousting of Margaret Thatcher. I suspect that Rayner will be exaggeratedly loyal to Starmer, while positioning herself slightly to his left. That seems the most promising route to a comeback in a party that values unity but which thinks that the prime minister has gone too far to the right. It is, after all, the position that seems likely to deliver Rayner’s vacated deputy leadership of the party to Lucy Powell against Bridget Phillipson, the government-approved candidate. (The result of that election will be announced next Saturday.)

In the six weeks since Rayner has fallen silent, it has been more obvious that the party lacks effective communicators. Streeting is the only cabinet minister whose ability to cut through is comparable to hers. I was struck by a study by the New Britain Project, to be published next week, which found that the most searched-for term in politics on the internet recently was “Angela Rayner” on the day of her resignation. Anna McShane, who carried out the research, told me: “What works is authenticity – and a bit of fight. Rayner cut through because people saw her as a fighter, even those who wanted her gone.” At a time when, as the study shows, most political news is forgotten within 24 hours, the level and duration of interest in Rayner is unusual.

The other quality that Rayner has is an instinctive grasp of politics. Her instinct was not good enough to make her double-check the tax position on her share of the former family home held in trust for her son, obviously, but her rise to the deputy premiership and her record of 14 months as a minister suggest that she has the ability to hold high office again.

She is not exactly popular with the general public, but she is the MP most favoured as a future leader by party members. Only Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, not an MP and therefore not eligible, scores more highly. And she is well liked by Labour MPs, whom she courted on two of their favourite subjects, employment rights and housebuilding. Labour members and MPs are the two constituencies she needs if she still wants to be leader.

I say “still” because I don’t believe her protestation, shortly before she left the cabinet, that “I don’t want to be leader of the Labour Party”. I am with Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, who said in Liverpool, “You should not believe anyone in politics who says they’re not ambitious about the top job because they’re basically lying,” although of course I would not use the l-word itself. I think Rayner is likely to come back to government. Laurie Magnus, the adviser on ministers’ interests, did her a big favour in his report, when he said that, despite her breaking the ministerial code by underpaying stamp duty, he believed she “has acted with integrity and with a dedicated and exemplary commitment to public service”.

The obstacle to her return is the prime minister, who does not trust her. But when I said, in a recent discussion of political predictions, that she wouldn’t come back because Starmer hates her, the response from one well-informed observer was: “What has that got to do with it?”