What is really going on in politics? Get our daily email briefing straight to your inbox Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

The more I hear from Angela Rayner the more fond of her I grow.

When the Mirror broke the story about Justine Greening leaving her Red Box in the street , Angela, who shadows the Education Minister, tweeted that given the amount of work the Government’s doing it probably only had “a butty and an apple” in it.

I particularly liked her using “butty” because that’s how she, and the people she represents, speak.

This is an honest trait which would be seen in every other democracy as commendable.

But not in this land of snobs and nobs. Instead, the Ashton-under-Lyne MP gets a social media savaging whenever she opens her Northern mouth on TV.

Nothing new in that, of course.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

BBC Breakfast presenter Steph McGovern once offended a viewer so much with her Middlesbrough accent they sent her £20 with a note saying: “I’m sorry about your affliction. Here’s £20 towards correction therapy.”

I advised her to send it back with a note saying: “I’ll be sorry to hear about your terrible fate when me dad visits you.

"Here’s £20 towards reconstruction surgery”, but I think Steph declined.

Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now

My late colleague James Whitaker (who was so posh he drank vending machine coffee from a champagne flute) regularly stopped me in mid-flow to ask: “Remind me again why you were never taught at school how to speak properly?”

This only encouraged me to crank-up the Scouse and call him an “auld blert”.

It always comes back to education. The main thrust of the abuse the Shadow Education Secretary got after last Sunday’s appearance on the Marr Show was that she sounded “thick”.

When the Foreign Secretary utters the economically illiterate charge that the EU can “go whistle” for a financial settlement or blathers incoherently about “pyramids of piffle” and black people being “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, his fitness for office isn’t questioned.

But he’s Eton and Oxford educated, so he must be very clever.

(Image: Getty)

Sticking with this theme, Tory MP Anne Marie Morris was this week heard using the outrageous phrase “n***** in the woodpile” in a debate.

Yet many on the right defended her, arguing she deserved better than to be hounded by the PC police because of her old-fashioned vocabulary.

Which is why, although Theresa May had no option but to suspend her from the party, insiders say she’ll be allowed back in after the summer recess. All forgiven.

Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now

Well the 60-year-old was educated at top boarding school Bryanston (annual fees £37,000), studied law at Oxford, and speaks in a proper received pronuciation manner – so who are we to question her use of language?

Questioning Angela Rayner’s fitness for office because she speaks in working-class Mancunian though, is fair game.

Despite her being brought up in a council house where there were no books, raised by a mum unable to help her with homework because she couldn’t read or write, and told at 16 when she left school with no qualifications after falling pregnant, that she would “amount to nothing”.

Then, by the age of 36, becoming a member of the Shadow Cabinet.

Yet instead of recognising the massive intellectual capacity she must possess to make that leap, she’s dismissed as being thick.

The reason being that in this country, to misquote Bananarama: “It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it, that’s what gets you dissed.”

Alls I can say, our kid, is if my two girls have proved themselves to be half as thick as you are by the time they’re 36, they’ll be well sorted.