The hounding of Angela Rayner is an apex moment of class awfulness - Alastair Stewart

King Charles III, accompanied by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner | PA

A long time ago, there was a Waterstones on George Street. It had beautiful black panels, and the whole place felt like a bookshop should. That could be a misty memory from someone working there as a student.

The "Painful Lives" section in the basement let it down. Parked next to the biography section, it was an awkward juxtaposition to the austere feeling the business was going for. The titular name was on point: the more miserable the life, the more tortured the childhood, the more impoverished, the more abuse and upset, the more popular the title.

George Street's reputation, and charm provoked a certain snobbery among some of the team.

The book section reflected the base "poverty porn" addiction of the early twenty-tens, like The Scheme, the egregious fly-on-the-wall documentary series set in a poverty-stricken housing estate in Kilmarnock. It was an appallingly edited BBC Scotland series with pretensions of gritty social study that presented as a bad comedy of the most tragic destitution. A year later, Owen Jones' inaugural book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, did much to dissect how "the salt of the earth" went from a respected backbone of the country to a hateful indulgence of middle-class voyeurism.

PA

Fifteen years later, you might have hoped for a general improvement. However, the return of Labour to power has only exposed how much we have been stuck in a time warp. The commentariat, Twitter and even politicians do not miss an opportunity to find perceived hypocrisy amongst the government ranks of avowed socialists. Ambition is treated as a class betrayal. Scrutiny is one thing, but rancid snobbery is becoming the plaything of the middle-class couch commentators.

And most of it is pastiche. The Conservatives cannot all be patrician snobs at the trough, and not every Labour politician is a champagne socialist. Once more, that quintessentially British passive-aggressiveness toward the so-called deserving and undeserving poor is back. Column inches and miles of social media scrolls are replete with deft inferences about left-wing politicians knowing their "station" or "place."

The hounding of Angela Rayner is an apex moment of class awfulness. The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Deputy Prime Minister has been subject to the vilest public humiliation. All of it centres on her working-class background, and all of it is the same poverty voyeurism. Perhaps more than any British politician of the last 20 years, Rayner has come in for the basest passive aggressiveness about all aspects of her character and career.

Rayner's northern accent has prompted articles in which she has to defend it as if it is somehow an exception, a novelty. In 2017, the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne was called "thick" following a TV appearance. Rayner said on Twitter: "Anonymous hard right accounts attacking my accent again saying l am thick etc, I will reiterate I am proud of my accent and will not change!" Last year, she was singled out for and mocked after she criticised the Tories for 14 years of "abstract failure" (presumably meaning abject).

The pattern is vitriolic. Leaving school while pregnant without qualifications has been the subject of the same innuendoes, including when it was reported she became a grandmother, usually followed by the less-than-subtle addendum "...at 37." Becoming a teenage mum on a council estate has come in for the same derision, just as her background as a care worker and trade union representative is treated as a disqualification to hold high office.

Former Conservative deputy prime minister Dominic Raab criticised Rayner for attending the Glyndebourne opera festival – calling it proof that "champagne socialism is back in the Labour party”. It's a cliche, to be sure, but it's hard to imagine the same treatment of a male politician. All of it reeks of station and class associations and the very worst of Britain.

All of this comes to the "pièce de résistance". In 2022, unnamed senior Tories claimed the then shadow deputy leader used her legs to "distract" Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Commons. They accused Rayner of "a fully clothed parliamentary equivalent of Sharon Stone's infamous scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct".

The deputy prime minister's fashion choices are also considered a fair barometer of her ability to serve her office: last week, Rayner wore apparently "insulting" shoes to meet the King during a visit to a sustainable housing project in Cornwall. She was simultaneously accused of a Royal "love-in," as if cordial relations with the serving Sovereign are somehow odd—unless uncommon for 'someone like her.'

The list is by no means exhaustive. It feels very much like our sexism, our snobbery, and our obsessive waiting game to see people from modest backgrounds fluff their lines has taken over. You are either too rich or poor, too inured by the system, too far removed, too stentorian, or too common. When the day's news focuses on the deputy prime minister's shoe choices, something has gone - and continues to go - seriously amiss.

We remain, sadly, an inherently prejudiced country: the only thing we hate more than flagrant success is flagrant ambition, and anyone seen to be swerving from their lane is considered a spectacle, a car crash waiting to happen for our class-stricken rubbernecking delight—shame on us.