Angela Rayner returned to Downing Street today as Britain’s new Deputy Prime Minister continued her work after taking over a key Whitehall department.
The 44-year-old was seen leaving No10 this morning after meeting with Sir Keir Starmer behind the famous black door for the third time in three days.
Following Labour’s general election victory, Ms Rayner was appointed both Deputy PM and Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
She is set to take the lead role in Labour’s promised housebuilding blitz, following the party’s general election pledge to build 1.5million new homes.
Ms Rayner is expected to soon unveil a new ministerial office for her department in Manchester and split her time between there and London.
It comes as Labour bosses face up to the threat posed by Reform UK, who won five seats at the general election and also came second in scores of others.
It has emerged how Sir Keir plans to portray Nigel Farage’s party as part of a ‘coalition of chaos’ alongside the defeated Tories.
According to the Sunday Times, Sir Keir will urge voters to reject Reform by swiping at the Tory governments of Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson and saying: ‘We don’t need a Reform government as we’ve already had the Reform-lite.’
A source told the newspaper that Labour would attack Mr Farage’s party as ‘continuity chaos’.
‘We cannot let these people loose on the country again,’ they said. ‘We don’t want more of their experiments that brought Britain to its knees — attention-seeking and headline-grabbing simplistic solutions.’
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show today, Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds confirmed Labour would ‘come for’ Reform.
‘We’ve got an outstanding mandate, but of course we take seriously and will analyse those results,’ he said of the performance of Reform on Thursday night.
‘I did meet in this election good people who were telling me they were thinking of voting Reform – that doesn’t mean Reform are good people.
‘When you were able to tell people ‘well, look, this is what they believe – they support the economic policies of Liz Truss, they support the foreign policies of Vladimir Putin’, people are horrified.
‘But now a party like Reform, now it has MPs, will come under the kind of scrutiny that they maybe always should have come under.
‘They will find that very difficult, and we will come for them – we will tell people what their agenda would mean for their economic security and their national security.’
But, amid the warnings Labour would now turn its fire on Reform after defeating Mr Sunak’s Tory government, Mr Farage today told Sir Keir: ‘We are coming for you.’
As well as winning five seats at Thursday’s election, Reform came in second place in a further 103 constituencies – the vast majority of which were won by Labour.
Last night, Lord Mandelson – one of the architects of New Labour – acknowledged the challenge facing Sir Keir.
The former Cabinet minister gave a speech to the Cercle des Économistes think tank in France, on the eve of the country’s second round of parliamentary elections.
Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally party are hoping for a historic victory in the French contest.
Speaking in Aix, Lord Mandelson said: ‘Have no illusions, Britain is not immune to the political forces we are seeing in France — this is a Europe-wide phenomenon.
‘A populist, nationalist movement is growing on the right in the UK too and how we all respond to this will shape politics for a generation.’