Hard Labour: How the Left lost women

Despite the temporary triumph of Angela Rayner, the Peoples Party is a masculinist stronghold.

Perhaps the most entertaining feature of the Labour Party's loss of the *safe seat* of Hartlepool last week (a seat so traditionally Red that someone once remarked that a monkey wearing a Labour rosette could take it) was the subsequent sacking and swift promotion of the MP Angela Rayner. One of the few members of working class origin, she was a carer for her sick mother at the age of ten, a mother herself at 16, a social care worker, an MP at 34, a grandmother at 36, in a party which was founded by a miner (Keir Hardie) and is now floundering under a knight of the realm (Sir Keir Starmer). And as such, the last person that this out-of-touch group of ‘stale, pale males’ shou ...