The Westminster bubble has slightly lost the plot following yesterday’s enjoyable PMQs. Raab’s attack against Rayner, that while her fellow MPs were out on the pickets lines she was quaffing champagne at an opera festival, is now being spun as some sort of Bullingdon-esque snobbery about working class people not being able to enjoy opera, rather than pointing out the hypocrisy of champagne socialism. It’s somehow managed to drown out the horror of Raab’s greater transgression – that wink…
Taking to Twitter afterwards, Rayner showed off another photo from the event, naming Tom Eisner as the person who invited her. Tom, she boasts, is a “working-class lad from Buxton“, who’s been “playing at the Glyndebourne for 36 years”.
Dominic Raab won’t approve but I did indeed go the opera last week (it cost me £62).
— Angela Rayner 🌹 (@AngelaRayner) June 29, 2022
Tom Eisner, a working-class lad from Buxton near where I grew up kindly invited me. He’s been playing violin at Glyndebourne for 36 years.
Never let anyone tell you you’re not good enough. 🎻 pic.twitter.com/7XE0GHBRPQ
Unsurprisingly Rayner didn’t manage to fit Eisner’s full CV into her tweet. He’s also been in the First Violin section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra since 1986. A long and illustrious career, Rayner would perhaps prefer to airbrush Eisner’s low point in 2011, when he along with three other members of the orchestra were suspended for up to nine months after signing a letter calling on the BBC to cancel a Proms concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, on the grounds the country is “an apartheid state”.
In 2016 Eisner also signed a letter in The Guardian that accused the Chief Rabbi of joining in with “sensationalist allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party, where the headlines’ decibel level is in inverse proportion to the evidence supporting them”. Other signatories of this letter also included Jackie Walker, Alexei Sayle and Tony Greenstein…
Labour can deal with the champagne-quaffing; this awkward fact could be slightly more difficult to bat away…
