Angela Rayner has insisted she has no ambitions to be prime minister because it will ruin her looks. Speaking on Lorraine Kelly’s daytime TV show, Keir Starmer’s deputy was asked about her own career plans after last night’s farcical Commons scenes raised the prospect of Keir Starmer being ousted.
ITV host Lorraine didn’t hold back as she said Sir Keir is looking “tired” and “under siege”. However Ms Rayner insisted she had no desire to replace him for one bizarre reason. Lorraine asked: “From a human point of view when you look at Keir Starmer, he looks tired, he looks under siege. As a person how is?
“You’re working with him all the time – he looks absolutely exhausted. Some have said he might not be here after xmas, he doesn’t have the stomach for it or anything.”
Ms Rayner replied: “You know what, even before I was in politics I said ’Have you ever seen a Prime Minister after a year or two in government?’ People always say to me ‘do you want to be Prime Minister’ and I always say not a chance, it’ll age me by 10 years!”
“And it does! Anyone who has been Prime Minister. It’s a very challenging job.”
Asked again if she would ever want the top job in British politics, the housing secretary simply replied: “Absolutely not”
Ms Rayner also claimed that the Labour Party is now “in a better place” after last night saw chaotic scenes in parliament.
The Prime Minister tore up his flagship welfare reforms at the last minute, gutting his own bill and removing all mentions of changes to Personal Independence Payments.
Labour MPs branded it a “shambles”, “the most unedifying spectacle I have ever seen” and a “total clusterf*** of Godzilla proportions”.
Ms Rayner dismissed the chaos as “argy bargy” that proves the Government was listening to furious rebels.
She told ITV: “The process of parliament can look argy bargy, it can look like everyone’s falling out, but that’s the way you get to a consensus, and when the crunch comes to a vote that’s like a flash point in the Commons.
“People might see that as all this chaos, but actually we’ve got to a better place now and we’ve got the Bill through parliament.”
