Angela Rayner yesterday admitted that voters are right to feel ‘frustrated’ with Labour‘s record in Government.
The Deputy Prime Minister was quizzed about a bombshell poll showing Reform UK would snatch as many as 146 seats from Labour – largely in its traditional working-class heartlands – if an election were held tomorrow.
Ms Rayner was among the Cabinet big beasts projected to lose her seat to Nigel Farage‘s insurgent party by last week’s Electoral Calculus survey.
While she acknowledged that Labour’s popularity has been plummeting in the polls since last July’s election, she insisted that the party could turn it around by the end of this Parliament because Sir Keir Starmer is ‘his own worst critic’ and will carry on ‘driving to win for the people’.
Speaking on the BBC‘s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, Ms Rayner was asked why Labour was apparently ‘failing to address the public’ following the latest poll’s findings.
She said: ‘Well, I think there’s been frustrations, and I can completely understand people’s frustrations, because we were elected on a mandate for change.
‘And people want to see change, and they want to see it immediately.
‘It takes time to turn that around, and I’m confident that during the course of this Parliament people will see we haven’t done slogans, these are structural problems that we’ve had in our economy and in our society for a long time, and therefore turning it around does take a little bit more than seven months.’
Deputy PM Angela Rayner (pictured) acknowledged Labour’s popularity has plummeted in the polls
Ms Rayner insisted that Sir Keir Starmer (picutred) is ‘his own worst critic’ and would turn things around by the end of this parliament
Defending Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, whose personal popularity rating has also plummeted, she added: ‘He won’t do what he thinks is popular. What he wants to do is deliver.
‘Because there’s nobody’s worse critic to Keir, than Keir [himself].
‘In my understanding of how he works, and my personal experience with him, is he will be feeling harder, if he doesn’t meet the target that he sets himself to make people better off, than anything any poll could tell him, or any election result.
‘He will want to drive to win for the people of this country and to deliver what he promised and set out what he was going to achieve.’
She claimed she ‘didn’t recognise’ embarrassing comments attributed to her in a new book that she once claimed Sir Keir ‘was incapable of running a bath’.
Referring to Get In, the book by Sunday Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, she added: ‘There’s lots of things that were said in that book that I don’t recognise to be honest, and it’s tittle tattle…we all have frustrations when we’re at work sometimes and I’m sure people have been frustrated with me at work sometimes.’
She also refused to deny branding Prince Andrew a ‘nonce’, another claim made in the book.
The Deputy PM defended her policy of cancelling elections for more than 5million people this year while she overhauls the local government system.
Local elections due to take place in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire will be cancelled and take place in 2026 instead, under the changes, which will see dozens of smaller councils merge into bigger ones in a bid to cut bureaucracy.
Ms Rayner refused to deny calling the Duke of York a ‘nonce’ – a claim made in a new book
Mr Farage has accused Labour of acting like ‘dictators’ by cancelling the vote for so many people.
Ms Rayner said: ‘What we’re trying to do is reorganise: The taxpayers get the best value for money from local government and they get to unlock powers from Whitehall pushed down to local areas through the mayoral model.’
Labour’s vote share has plummeted in a series of polls since last July’s election, along with Sir Keir’s personal popularity.
One poll last month, by More In Common, found that the PM was more unpopular than former premier Rishi Sunak ever was, with his net popularity rating sinking to minus 42.
The worst score recorded for Mr Sunak during his leadership of the Conservative Party was minus 41 on election day last July.
Sir Keir’s premiership has been repeatedly rocked by scandals and backlashes against his policies.
He has made several major speeches in recent months in a bid to reboot his faltering premiership.
Sir Keir answering PMQs from the dispatch box in the Commons last Wednesday
But the economy has suffered several months of flatlining growth and business confidence after Chancellor Rachel Reeves hit firms with a multi-billion pound tax bomb in her October budget.
As well as hiking employers’ National Insurance contributions, Labour is increasing red tape on firms with a raft of new workers’ rights laws. It is estimated that these will cost businesses billions more.
There have also been furious backlashes against the ‘family farm’ tax, releasing thousands of prisoners early, hiking university tuition fees and stripping 10million pensioners of their winter fuel payments while handing inflation-busting pay hikes to rail union barons.
Among other scandals has been the row over freebies after it emerged he accepted more than £35,000-worth of clothes and glasses for him and his wife from party grandee Lord Alli.