SARAH VINE: BEWARE ANGELA, BORIS

ANGELA Rayner doesn’t look like a politician. She looks like one of those cool female comedians you find on Channel 4 panel shows. She’s confident, sexy, a little bit unhinged.

She doesn’t sound like a politician either. She speaks like a normal human being, the kind of person you might meet at work or down the pub. She is clever and quick but she has no airs and graces, no arrogance, no obvious sense of her own self-importance.

She also (and this really shouldn’t matter, but of course it does) has great hair. Oh, and a Labour rose tattooed on her calf.

She is, in short, a bit of a phenomenon. She is also the closest thing that the Labour Party has had to an electable leader in a very long time.

Except, of course, she isn’t the leader because a) Keir Starmer is and b) the Labour Party is full of such incorrigible old sexists that it’s never yet elected a woman to that post (meanwhile the wicked Tories have had two women leaders).

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t a force to be reckoned with, not just for the Labour Party itself, but also for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party.

BECAUSE make no mistake: if dear old Keir is a bit of a Joe Biden, a somewhat less than thrilling prospect for the electorate, Rayner is Kamala Harris: the kind of electrifying female politician who is not only genuinely charismatic, but whose principles and personality also happen to fit perfectly into the modern political narrative.

She ticks so many boxes. Disadvantaged upbringing (her mother was bipolar and illiterate, and Rayner has said that her mother used to feed her dog food by mistake because she couldn’t read the labels), resilience (she had a baby at 15 and left school at 16, but never let either stand in her way), reallife experience (she grew up on a tough council estate and worked

as a carer), honesty (she is brutally frank about the way her early experiences have shaped her) and a tendency to overshare (essential in this modern social media age).

She is authentic in a way that politicians dream of but which very few can claim to be. She brings her real-life experience to the Dispatch Box every time she gets on her feet.

For the members of the Conservative Party sitting opposite her, many of whom are rather cosseted men who have never experienced anything close to a woman like her, she is a confusing and sometimes baffling prospect.

She is also something else, something far more powerful: she is a genuine outsider with nothing to lose. She has none of the champagne socialism of Corbyn (although she is in many ways

more extreme than him in her policies) and none of the smug entitlement of a Miliband or a Blair. She is unique, and you can take her or leave her, she doesn’t much care which.

There aren’t many survivors like her in the House of Commons. It’s a place that chews people up and spits them out; you have to be incredibly tough – and very possibly a little

damaged – to survive and thrive there. Rayner is all those things and more. And she’s in her element.

Most importantly, though, she brings a kind of energy to Starmer’s leadership that he could not possible muster himself. Without her, he is just another rather dour intellectual lacking in spirit or soul; she breathes life into his leadership and opens him up to a different

demographic. Once again, as Harris did for Biden.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no more desire to see Rayner in power than I do to see Nicola Sturgeon lead Scotland to independence. But you can admire someone without agreeing with their politics. You can also fear them as an opponent.

If I were Starmer, I would watch out – and if I were Boris Johnson, I’d watch out even more.