Angela Rayner’s battle with Nimbys is as misguided as her reasons for needing a personal photographer - David Behrens

Three years ago she criticised Boris Johnson for doing the same thing when he was running the country. “The public will be rightly questioning why there is apparently no limit on the money that can be found to pay for a coterie of vanity photographers for the prime minister,” is what she said.

Yet here she is, not running the country but nevertheless splashing out £68,000 a year on a vanity project of her own: a ‘chief photographer to the deputy PM and Ministry of Housing and Communities’.

You might well ask why the local government ministry needs a chief photographer or any photographers at all. Rayner told ITV’s Lorraine Kelly that she was simply trying to counter critics who complained that they never saw her.

Is that what she thinks her critics are cross about? For someone as self-conscious as she clearly is, she has surprisingly little knowledge of what drives the rest of us. Politics is about people, not ministers. No-one wants to see photos of a secretary of state inside her nice warm office when they’re shivering at home because they’ve lost their winter fuel allowance or they’re huddled on a railway platform waiting for a train that’s never coming.

It’s what our MPs do that matters, not what they look like. And that brings us to a far more serious misjudgment by Rayner and her ministry alienating those who dare to seek the best for their communities.

‘Nimbys’ are the latest people the government has chosen to disaffect and they’re in good company, alongside pensioners, farmers, nurses and teachers – the last of whom were insulted this week with a pay rise barely above inflation. Many people will fall into two of those categories and be doubly cheesed off.

Keir Starmer said last week he would “face down” nimbys who stood in the way of plans to build 1.5m homes over the next few years and it has fallen to Rayner to sign off sweeping changes that will make the targets mandatory for the first time. There’s probably a photograph of her doing it.

The trouble is, we’re all nimbys at one time or another. None of us wants unsympathetic developments in our backyards that threaten our quality of life and that of the neighbourhood. The pride we take in our surroundings is what makes them nice places to live. It’s communities without love that are the ones with problems. And Starmer himself was happy enough to play the nimby card when he opposed a high speed rail line through his constituency.

Rayner’s stated intention to bypass local councils and ride roughshod over objectors who stand in the way of her bulldozers is tantamount to class warfare on middle-English values. It’s impossible to reconcile with the government’s other promise to devolve more power to the regions.

It’s also a quite unnecessary stance for her to take because there is much in Labour’s package of planning reforms that is actually welcome.

In particular, prioritising urban ‘brownfield’ sites for redevelopment could reinvigorate entire areas that have been fenced off and left to rot. And separating so-called grey belt land from genuine green spaces and freeing them up for development could also yield benefits – but only if locals who know the areas best are allowed their say.

Rayner told Lorraine Kelly she was trying to “strike the right balance” as a minister but in choosing to communicate the planning changes in such a combative way she has fallen off the Westminster tightrope. (Not literally. That really would have made a good picture.)

We will get a better idea of how the dice have fallen for caring communities when the grey belt areas are set out in detail – and when Rayner tells us more about the new prisons she is also forcing through the planning process without council involvement, this time on the grounds of “national importance”.

Meanwhile, Starmer has busied himself with alienating other sectors, complaining that too many of his civil servants were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” but then backpedalling and grovelling to their union. This was ironic because he was right in the first place. He seems willing to face down everyone except his own staff.

He could have taken a leaf instead from Rayner’s book and sent photographers around Whitehall so we could see the tepid civil servants for ourselves. They’d have needed a slow motion camera, mind you.