The problem is that the other half, made up of the hard left and trade union activists, would love it. And it could happen. If Andy Burnham loses the Makerfield by-election, Rayner is expected to make her move against Keir Starmer. Who can stop her? Wes Streeting? Fat chance. He’s too right-wing for today’s deranged Labour Party. Ed Miliband? He’d rather let Rayner front the operation while he runs things behind the scenes. So there’s a very real chance she could be PM within months.

Rayner is a political steamroller. She even rode roughshod over HMRC, which waved through her stamp duty swerve. That's baffled and angered lawyers who’ve seen tax inspectors take a far tougher line with their own clients. Rayner has also wriggled out of claims that she avoided paying capital gains tax on the ex-council house when it was sold in 2015, and was aware of electoral fraud being plotted in her own kitchen. Rayner says she knew nothing about it. Perhaps she’d stepped outside for a vape.

But her most damaging legacy will be the Employment Rights Bill, which started rolling out last December. Business groups warn it will heap billions of pounds of extra costs onto employers, deter recruitment and hand sweeping new powers to the unions. It's about to spread chaos.

The bill expands day-one rights to sick pay and parental leave, broadens bereavement leave to cover pretty much anybody you know, gives unions greater access to workplaces and makes strikes easier to organise by dismantling Conservative-era restrictions on industrial action. It’s been described as a skiver’s charter.

Businesses already face soaring national insurance bills and steep minimum wage hikes thanks to chancellor Rachel Reeves. Now they’re expected to absorb another wave of costs and bureaucracy too. The damage is already becoming apparent.

The jobs market has cratered, with unemployment climbing from 4.1% to 5% under Labour. Another 163,000 jobs are expected to disappear this year alone. Youth unemployment is turning into a national catastrophe, now at a 12-year high. Reeves’s jobs tax and two inflation-busting minimum wage hikes have priced an entire generation out of the labour market.

Yet Rayner refuses to acknowledge the connection. During the local elections she insisted: “a rising minimum wage must go alongside our programme to get young people into work”. Doesn’t she realise the first objective destroys the second?

Nobody else in Labour seems to grasp basic economics, so perhaps there’s no reason Angela Rayner should be the exception. But the real chaos hasn’t even started yet. Rayner’s legislation is about to unleash a wave of trade union militancy Britain hasn’t seen since the 1970s. We’re already seeing the first signs in schools.

The National Education Union is preparing for industrial confrontation, with activists planning to “flood schools” with pro-strike propaganda and put the union “on a war footing”, according to the Daily Mail.

Gen Z teachers are being trained in agitation and organising tactics while unions prepare to exploit Rayner’s softer strike laws, including online ballots and the removal of thresholds that made walkouts harder to stage. And remember, this comes despite teachers already receiving substantial pay rises.

We saw exactly the same pattern with the rail unions. No sooner had Labour caved into one set of demands than the next disputes started. That’s the problem with feeding militant unions. They always come back for more.

Rayner’s bill opens the door to a new era of industrial unrest just as the economy is already buckling under high taxes, weak growth and collapsing business confidence. Britain spent years escaping the chaos of the 1970s. Rayner is dragging us straight back there, and she doesn’t even need to become PM to do it. Just imagine if she does.