Angela Rayner has hired a photographer for about £68,000 of your money to capture her in her role as the Deputy Prime Minister in order to boost her image. This follows reports that in the one and only sensible move of his premiership, Keir Starmer is said to be freezing her out. Long may that last.

I never thought I’d say this, but the ghastly Rayner is making her predecessor as Labour Deputy PM, John Prescott, look like the very model of statesmanship and decorum but if she really wants to boost her standing with the electorate, here are a few hints.

Do not accept gifts, including clothes and a trip to New York in a £2.5million penthouse, and then claim that you needed these boosts because you are working class. Others are all at it too, of course, see elsewhere on this page.

Do not let yourself be pictured dancing in an Ibizan club on the day your party leader is issuing dire warnings that can be summed up as “we’re all doomed”, looking as if you are having the time of your life. Do not then try to explain this on the grounds that you like a dance because you’re working class.

Do not trouser 48 thousand smackeroos on the back of the council house sale that may or may not have been your main home and then try to stop anyone else from doing likewise by banning the sale of council houses.

And do not – allegedly – try to bend the rules in order to turn a quick buck.

This time around it was not Rayner who blamed it on being working class, but Keir Starmer. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to question the tax arrangements on this transaction (and he was not alone), Starmer informed him he was “smearing a working class woman”.

Funnily enough, the then

opposition leader did not leap to the defence of Rishi’s wife when she, too, was questioned about tax affairs.

Do not declare your political opponents to be “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, mis

ogynistic, absolute vile… banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum” just because they happen to disagree with you.

It goes without saying that Ms Rayner initially defended the use of such wording as being the “street language” of her working class youth; she was finally forced to apologise.

Wake up and look in the mirror. The gobby, female working class schtick might have got her this far, but the whole country is now sick to death of it.

Try to act with a little more dignity. But I fear where Rayner is concerned, maybe that’s an ask too far.