Earlier this year, Angela Rayner was weighing up whether to reach for the Labour crown if Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership was challenged.
The resolution of an HMRC investigation into her tax affairs, long seen as a barrier to any leadership bid, cleared a path for the former deputy prime minister to take part in any contest to replace her old boss.
But in the end she added her name to the wave of Labour MPs nominating Andy Burnham as leader, propelling the former Greater Manchester mayor into Downing Street uncontested.
Now she has made a return to the cabinet, with Burnham giving her back the job of housing secretary from which she resigned in September last year, after admitting she did not pay enough tax on the purchase of a new home.
It is a role in which she will play a key part in his drive to devolve power away from Westminster and deliver a major programme of council house building.
Her against-the-odds story, personality, and ability to connect with parts of the electorate other politicians have struggled to reach are likely to make her a prominent voice within Burnham’s top team.
Born Angela Bowen in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in 1980, Rayner grew up on one of the area’s poorest council estates and from an early age was caring for her mother, who had bipolar disorder and suffered from depression.
Both Rayner’s parents were unemployed and speaking in 2017, she remembered having to grow up very quickly.
“My mum was a really vulnerable person. I remember, at 10, my mum being suicidal and me sleeping like a dog on the end of her bed, just to try and stay next to her so she didn’t do any harm to herself,” Rayner said.
She has also recalled going to her grandmother’s flat on Sundays, so the family could take it in turns to have a bath there. Hot water was too expensive for them to use at home.
Rayner has often spoken about being told she would “never amount to anything”, after she left school without any qualifications.
But after having her first child at 16, Rayner studied part-time at college, learning British sign language and gaining a vocational qualification in social care.
She spent a number of years as a care worker in Stockport, mainly looking after elderly people in their own homes, while also rising quickly through the ranks of the union, Unison.
She has described herself as “mouthy”, someone who would “take no messing from management”.
In her 20s, she became a full-time union official and eventually, after battles over working conditions and zero-hour contracts, rose to the most senior elected role in Unison in north-west England.
It was at Unison she met Mark Rayner, a fellow union official whom she married in 2010 and divorced in 2023. The couple went on to have two sons, one of whom was born so prematurely he is registered blind and has special educational needs.
At the age of 37, the mum-of-three became a grandmother, sparking the nickname “Grangela”.
She credits the trade union movement with encouraging her to enter politics and taking her from – in her own words – “the girl on a council estate” to “a woman who feels like she can conquer the world”.
Those ambitions started to be realised in 2015, when she was elected as the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne – a seat not far from her hometown. She later said she had only stood to make the point that “people like me can’t get elected” and had “accidentally” won the seat.
A self-described “proper working-class” woman, Rayner rose quickly in Westminster, taking up the women and equalities and education briefs in the shadow cabinet of former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
When Corbyn stood down in 2020, following Labour’s worst general election result since 1935, Rayner did not run for the leadership, and backed her ally Rebecca Long-Bailey, who came second to Sir Keir.
Instead, Rayner stood for the deputy leadership and won election to that post comfortably – going on to be a central figure in Sir Keir’s bid to remake the party.
However, relations between Sir Keir and Rayner were sometimes tense. After Labour lost control of eight English councils and lost the seat of Hartlepool in a parliamentary by-election in May 2021, the deputy leader was removed from her post as party chairwoman.
She pushed back, and was appointed shadow first secretary of state among other titles.
By that point, Rayner had a strong support base and a powerful role likened to that of John Prescott, who was seen as a political bridge between the working class and the New Labour project during Tony Blair’s premiership.
Rayner heavily leaned into that role and tried to use it to her party’s advantage in the years before Labour’s general election win in 2024.
Outspoken and combative at times, Rayner repeatedly accused the Conservatives of being “out of touch”, and hammered the party with lines such as “one rule for them and another rule for us” during the scandal over pandemic parties in Downing Street.
Sometimes Rayner admitted she had gone too far, once apologising for describing senior Conservatives as “a bunch of scum”.
Her prominence and the venom of her political attacks had put a target on her back and attracted unwanted headlines.
In 2021, Rayner lashed out at “sexism and misogyny” in politics, after a newspaper reported that she crossed and uncrossed her legs during prime minister’s questions to distract Boris Johnson.
And in 2024, she was investigated by the police over the tax paid on the sale of her council house, again following a slew of reports by unfriendly newspapers, cheered on by the Conservatives. She was not found to have committed a criminal offence.
Her tendency to brush through political controversies gave her an air of untouchability, with some dubbing her “Teflon Ange”.
Her stock had risen further still as deputy prime minister, leading on one of Labour’s key pledges to build 1.5 million homes by 2030, and helping Sir Keir quell a rebellion by Labour MPs over welfare cuts.
But the political optics of a housing secretary admitting she had not paid enough when buying her £800,000 flat in Hove were not easy on the eye.
Rayner faced charges of hypocrisy and calls for her to stand down, and she did so after admitting arrangements on her family home in Greater Manchester meant she should have paid a higher rate.
She resigned from government after the prime minister’s ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus declared that she had breached the ministerial code.
HMRC launched an investigation, and almost 10 months later, as a leadership crisis engulfed her party, a conclusion was reached.
Rayner announced she had settled £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty, and had been “exonerated” of the accusation she had “deliberately sought to avoid tax”.
In an interview with the Guardian, the prime minister’s former deputy did not rule out running in any Labour leadership race but said she would not “trigger” a contest.
Pressed over whether the prime minister should step aside, Rayner said: “Keir will have to reflect on that.”
Prior to his downfall as Labour leader, Sir Keir had suggested he could bring Rayner back into his cabinet, adding she had the “best social mobility story this country has ever seen”.
It is a story she will be hoping to continue after her return to cabinet, as Labour heads in a new direction under Burnham.
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