AN UNLIKELY MATCH

Walking beside Charles, Angela Rayner looked entirely in step. We shouldn’t be shocked, says Tessa Dunlop, theirs is a relationship built on a long tradition of warmth and affection

- Tessa Dunlop

The rosy cheeks, the knowing looks, and the belly laughs were all on display for us to see this week in Cornwall. Cue an unashamed love-in between the Windsor King and salt-of-theearth Angela from Stockport. On the surface, the monarch and his housing minister, Rayner, cut an unlikely couple, but their clear affection for each other speaks to the enduring success story behind the British monarchy, one that is all too often overlooked by a middle-class commentariat who have more in common with the prime minister than his deputy.

It’s par for the course that Keir Starmer (like the Blairs before him) appears a little nonplussed around royalty (the Queen Mother had no time for Cherie’s “stiff knees”). And during their joint engagement on Monday, our sharp-suited PM certainly looked a little spare as the trio visited the Dutchy’s modern housing development in Cornwall.

Accusations flew thick and fast. How dare the prime minister embroil the sovereign in his “Build, Baby Build!” campaign. What was the King thinking, exposing himself to potential political bias when the Labour government was clearly seeking to bulldoze its way to success? But the press were so busy tutting (and narking about Rayner’s leopard-print brothel creepers) that few of them clocked the real driver behind this unusual collaboration.

Step forward, a deputy prime minister so comfortable in her skin, so blissfully besotted with royalty, and so very different from self-made Starmer – these days, the personification of bourgeois, a man who has long since shed his tool-making start in life.