Angela Rayner vows to not ‘do a Prezza’ as she provides tour of Labour’s battle bus

When John Prescott toured the country in the 2001 election campaign he famously ended up punching a voter.

But as we speed around the M25 on the maiden voyage of Labour’s 2024 battle bus, Angela Rayner insists this Deputy Leader won’t be whacking anyone but the Tories in debates over policy. “No, no, nobody is going to be assaulting anybody,” she says. “No punching. We want to get back to politics that is kinder. We want to get back to policy. That is what we want to debate in this election.

“We can be constructive. Stop the dirty tricks, like what the Tories did to me. Let’s put a programme of government forward and let the people decide. Do they want change with Labour or more of the same from the Tories?”

Next week the election campaign will step up a gear as Keir Starmer faces Rishi Sunak on ITV on Tuesday in the first TV debate of the campaign. Angela, who for the last five years has sat next to Keir each week at Prime Minister’s Questions, says the Labour leader will show he “really cares about the country” and is ready to “roll up his sleeves” and make it better.

“That’s the sort of leader you want, someone who’s going to say, ‘we’re not messing around, we know there are challenges the country faces’. He’s up for that challenge,” she says.

The last few days of the campaign have been overshadowed by rows over whether Diane Abbott should be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate. Keir announced on Friday the veteran would be able to after Angela fired a warning shot by publicly declaring she could “not see any reason” why she shouldn’t.

The Tories crowed that the Labour leader was being pushed around by his deputy. But she immediately pushes back when I suggest this. “That is rubbish,” she says. “We both value the contribution that Diane has made to Parliament. So I don’t see any difference. And I certainly don’t push Keir around.

“I respect Keir as the leader of the Labour Party and he’s done a fantastic job. When Keir became leader in 2019, we had suffered our worst defeat and he has changed the Labour Party. We’re in a position now where the party is focused on representing the country. Keir is very clear about that and he has got my full support in that.”

Another thing that had threatened to disrupt the campaign was the police investigation launched after Tory Deputy Chairman James Daly reported her over claims she owed tax on the sale of her former council house almost a decade ago. But after HMRC concluded she didn’t, Greater Manchester Police announced this week that it had abandoned the probe.

She accuses the Tories of “wasting police resources” by pursuing their “smear campaign” against her. “I don’t blame the police,” she says. “But the public were thinking ‘hang on a minute, we’ve got all this crime going on and we can’t get help’. There were briefings that up to 12 police officers were investigating me for weeks on end. I think people were very frustrated by that.”

As well as the impact on her close family, Angela says it was a strain on her personally. “I felt a sense of humiliation that people thought that I had done something wrong. And that was really hard for me,” she says. “What I learned from it is that you have to dig deep and be resilient.

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“I think the support I got really helped. I’d like to think I’m quite an independent person, my mum and dad weren’t able to give me everything as a child, I have always felt that I have looked after myself and been quite self-reliant. Over that period I realised that I needed my friends and family, who were there for me, they really helped me through it.”

Now with that saga firmly behind her, she is taking the battle bus – emblazoned with Labour branding and the slogan “Change” both inside and out – on a 5,000-mile journey to battleground seats across the country over the next four-and-a-bit weeks.

As Keir joined her and Rachel Reeves at its launch in Uxbridge, west London, this morning, the Labour leader joked about Boris Johnson, who used to be the local MP. “This [bus], Ange, I’m reliably told has got a fridge in the back of it,” he said. “So check that Boris Johnson isn’t in there. He used to be around these parts.”

But as she gives me a tour as the bus heads to its first stop in Harlow, it turns out a reminder of another former PM is in the fridge. “Hang on a minute, how have you got in here?,” she laughs as she takes out a lettuce with two googly eyes, put in there as a nod to Liz Truss.

Asked what she will say to voters yet to be convinced Labour will actually be able to make life better for struggling families as she tours the country, she says: “The Tories want people to feel that things can’t get any better and that the last 14 years are not their fault. They want to blame everything else. Whereas we know the aspirations of this country. The people of this country can deliver so much better for our economy going forward.”

Polls show Labour has a commanding lead over the Tories, but she admits all election candidates get “candidatitis” where they have doubts about whether they will really win. “Can you imagine another five years of the Conservatives after what we have had?” she asks. “They’ve really done down our country and we really need to rebuild. We are not cocky about that at all.

“I’ve been a Member of Parliament for nine years now and have been in opposition those whole nine years. I’ve not had an opportunity to change the country. I want that opportunity. I say to the British public, give us that opportunity. We haven’t had that opportunity. Let us prove that we can change things for the better.”