Here’s why I have less than no sympathy for Angela Rayner. @DalloulAhmed, a Palestinian takeaway owner, was a constituent of hers. She’d met him several times, visited his shop and posed for pictures with him, emphasised her support for Palestinian freedom. She gave him a tour of Parliament. They repeatedly corresponded by text message. Within weeks of the genocide, his mother, brother, sister-in-law, and two little nieces were murdered in an Israeli air strike. He was desperate to evacuate his wife and little daughter, only 4 months old, from Gaza. This little child was buried under rubble three times by Israeli attacks. He emailed Angela Rayner twice to seek her help evacuating his family. She ignored him. He then turned up to a Labour fundraiser in January 2024, and stood up, clutching pictures of his dead mother, talking about his murdered family, asking for Angela’s support for a ceasefire. She knew exactly who this man was. He was then thrown out of the meeting and on to the street by security like he was trash. She did nothing, and simply said “Thank you, you’ve made your point.” Just take a moment to absorb what was happening here. A Palestinian man she was friendly with, whose family had been slaughtered by a British-facilitated Israeli onslaught, whose pleas to evacuate his wife and daughter had been ignored by her, stood up holding photos of his murdered mother, pleading for her to take a stand against the violence slaughtering her family. It gets worse. A few days later she was interviewed about the incident by Sky News’ @BethRigby, who framed it as an example of the sort of threats that politicians have to face. Here is one utterly repulsive example of the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Imagine this was a Israeli man whose family had been killed on 7th October. If the same thing had happened, it would have caused a national scandal and ruined Angela Rayner’s career long before any stamp duty row. Since this hideous episode, so many of Dalloul’s loved ones have been murdered by the Israeli government that their names fill three pages. Angela served as deputy prime minister in a government which continued to arm and facilitate this genocide. I used to have huge respect for Angela Rayner. But she’s someone whose pursuit of power led her to make an accommodation with the worst people in the history of the Labour Party. The great moral test of our time was Israel’s genocide, and a belief that Palestinians are human beings of equal worth. Angela failed that test. Her political demise should be mourned by no one.