Angela Rayner has returned from last week’s pointless jaunt to Ethiopia and Ghana to questions over her contradictory career history statements. Rayner has claimed to have worked as a home carer for “almost a decade,” 14 years, 15 years, and 17 years. Labour’s spin to hacks is that her “permanent and substantive” role was as a home help until 2015. Guido Verify has examined the claims…
As Guido pointed out on the weekend that ‘substantive’ term is an invention of the unions. Rayner herself contradicted the ‘working as a home help’ notion in a cozy podcast appearance with James O’Brien…
The now-DPM spoke about austerity in Stockport Council with a sympathetic O’Brien in a 2021 episode of his “Full Disclosure” podcast:
“Like literally all my colleagues were offered voluntary and honestly, in fact, my boss now still says I’m the last standing home help for a long time because I was a union rep, so I wasn’t technically – even though my ‘substantive post’ was a home help, I’d gone into the union at this point. So he said, you were the last home help standing.”
Rayner confirms there that when the union work started, the carer work came to and end. The ‘home help’ title was purely nominal…
She similarly told a sixth-form college in 2019:
“I started working for the council where they paid travel time and paid your holiday pay they trained you I got my NVQ level 2 in care so started to do really well – and then became a union rep and that’s really I would got involved in politics.”
Sources who knew Rayner at the time claim she only actually worked as a home help for approximately three years at the beginning of the noughties. Amid scrutiny over the sale of her council house a teary Rayner told hacks last year: “At the time of the sale of the house, I was a home carer.” Her own recorded statements along with supplementary evidence have clarified she was a full-time union rep and not doing any home help work. This is the latest Labour CV scandal that is looking very tricky…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”