Angela Rayner has made her defenders look like fools

In Barnsley it’s a pork pie, in Ireland it’s a beer jug and in parts of the North, we now know the word ‘growler’ can mean something else entirely. Thanks to Angela Rayner, I have learned a vulgar term for female genitalia, and something much more useful – that after 20 years of dealing with slippery politicians, I am still capable of being taken in. There I was, thinking I’d seen it all before, when along comes the deputy leader of the Labour party, privately boasting about flashing her crotch in parliament – then publicly crying sexism. And, like many others, I fell for it.

It is now abundantly clear that Ms Rayner is not the target of outrageous misogyny that she had us believe. It turns out that the scurrilous Tory sources who claimed she likes to emulate sex siren Sharon Stone in the movie Basic Instinct to put Boris Johnson off his stride were only repeating what she has said herself.