The woman most likely to replace Sir Keir Starmer reportedly took aim at his leadership on Tuesday night, warning that Labour was burning through whatever goodwill remained from its landslide victory and that a reckoning was coming unless the Government changed tack urgently.

The Express understands Angela Rayner’s address to Mainstream — a pressure group on Labour’s soft left with close ties to Andy Burnham — was her most unambiguous signal yet that she believes the party is heading for disaster under its current trajectory. She is said to have attacked the Government’s approach to migration as “un-British” and told the room that Labour had allowed itself to become indistinguishable from the political class it had swept to power promising to shake up.

Ms Rayner reportedly said: “As a party and a movement, we cannot hide. We cannot just go through the motions in the face of decline.

“There’s no safe ground for us, and we’re running out of time. The change that people wanted to so desperately to see needs to be seen.

“It needs to be felt, and we have to show that it’s a Labour government that will deliver it, and many of you in this room will deliver that for us. Our party is your party.

“And we have to come together in the face of division of hate and make sure that the Labour Party represents the ordinary working people of this country. And I’m in there with you, so I can’t wait to get involved with you.”

Circling the leadership

The subtext of Tuesday’s speech was impossible to miss. Ms Rayner quit the Cabinet last autumn after a media investigation into her tax arrangements — but rather than fading from view, she has spent the months since sharpening her critique of a government she once served at its highest level, reports the Telegraph.

The Express has already reported how the damage is expected to be severe in May, when council elections across England are forecast to deliver a brutal verdict — with Reform UK and the Greens poised to strip away seats that Labour had considered safely its own.

The direction of travel was signalled unmistakably last month in Gorton and Denton, where the Greens captured what should have been an unassailable Labour stronghold and Reform squeezed past Sir Keir’s candidate to push the governing party into an embarrassing third place.

It is not the first time she has chosen to go public rather than suffer in silence. Previous flashpoints have included the Government’s approach to welfare reform and what Ms Rayner regarded as unacceptable delays in releasing documents at the heart of the Lord Mandelson controversy.

‘At worst, we became it’

The setting — a Westminster pub on a Tuesday evening — was deliberately unpretentious. Ms Rayner opened by pointing to her record on workers’ and renters’ rights before pivoting to the central charge, it was reported.

She added: “There’s no point in people like me reeling off lists like this in rooms like this.

“Because – let’s be honest – the public, they have the impression that we’ve defended the status quo rather than challenged it, represented the establishment, not working people, and at worst, we became it.”

According to the Telegraph, she made clear Sir Keir had no business feeling “embarrassed” about Labour’s core values — and that a leader who believed in them should not be waiting to be “dragged” to act on them. The room was said to have understood the reference: a Prime Minister who has reversed course on more than a dozen significant commitments under backbench pressure, most damagingly on the two-child benefit cap and on the scale of planned reductions to welfare expenditure.

Pressure from all sides

Burnham’s Mainstream project was born last September out of a specific anxiety: that Labour’s poll collapse was terminal unless something fundamental changed. Mr Burnham himself reportedly confirmed at the time that colleagues had been in his ear about mounting a challenge for the top job. The group’s demands go well beyond rhetoric — it wants public ownership of transport, water and energy, and has called for nothing less than a wholesale reorientation of government policy.

The electoral picture has only darkened since. Reform is systematically dismantling Labour’s working-class base in its traditional heartlands, while the Greens are peeling away younger and more progressive voters who came to Labour in 2024 hoping for transformation and found continuity instead.

Shabana Mahmood’s migration agenda drew particular fire from Ms Rayner, who condemned it as “un-British” — language calculated to sting in a Government already struggling to find its footing on one of the defining issues of the parliament.