Bridget Phillipson’s move to replace Angela Rayner as deputy leader of the Labour Party is a flex aimed at showing No 10 there is life after Sir Keir Starmer.

When Rayner resigned on Friday, Labour was left with two vacancies. The first was in her formal role as deputy leader of the Labour Party, which Starmer has tried to downgrade by swiftly appointing David Lammy as Deputy Prime Minister – and declining to guarantee the new party deputy will be awarded a Cabinet position.

The second opening is as the most senior member of the party, with links to the trades union movement and the status that implies as one of the party’s prospective leaders-in-waiting. Phillipson, having suffered from negative briefing against her earlier in the year from some quarters of No 10, is also showing those close to Starmer the strength of her individual mandate by the numbers of MPs primed to endorse her.

The string of well-organised tweets that flowed online – as Phillipson launched her candidacy on Tuesday morning – won’t go unnoticed in No 10. She also hot-footed it down to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton to be the only member of the Cabinet to sit on the platform alongside the comrades gathered there this week.

Her speech to the TUC sounded much more like a launch to be prime minister than mere deputy Labour leader. It ranged from her Geordie mam seeing off a thug with a baseball bat, her working-class background, the NHS – even the miners. She took on

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