IN a week of storms, Angela Rayner may prove more useful than a weathervane – one only needs to listen to her latest utterance to know which way the wind is blowing.

So it was that the erstwhile member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet utilised Matt Forde’s Political Party – a podcast presumably intended for people unaware that any other podcasts exist – to voice her opinions on law and order, on which she whimsically described herself as “quite hardline".

“I am like, shoot the terrorists and ask questions later,” the Labour deputy leader commented, before cheekily wondering: “Sorry – is that the most controversial thing I’ve ever said?” She didn’t quite ask the chuckling audience if they were "triggered", but it was a near thing.

Given the context, one might be forgiven for thinking Rayner was trying to be funny (which is more than Matt Forde has ever achieved). Unfortunately, if a Labour politician backing a trigger-happy police state is supposed to be a joke, I’ve heard it before – and it wasn’t funny the first time.

Controversy predictably followed her remarks, and it’s hardly difficult to discern why: not merely because the kind of policing Rayner advocates led to the death of the Brazilian electrician Charles de Menezes – shot dead in a south London tube station in 2005 after being mistaken for a suicide bomber – but because the police are not famous for their inclination to ask any questions, no matter how much later they may come. As his family need no reminding, the Metropolitan Police were not exactly eager to co-operate fully with the inquest into the death of de Menezes, which was subject to countless delays and obstructions.

Still, let us assume for the moment that Rayner is not completely clueless, and that she might have predicted exactly the kind of response her comments would elicit. Provoking this kind of outrage from the Left is unlikely to give anyone in Keir Starmer’s circle sleepless nights – indeed, it may be seen as a feature, rather than a bug, of his leadership.

Yet the idiocy of Rayner’s remarks lies not just in the moral abhorrence of her relaxation with extrajudicial murder, but in the potential for such a policy to backfire on any opportunistic Labourites wishing to burnish their image as law-and-order authoritarians.

Such a grift is familiar in the United States, where centrist Democrats have been at pains to put behind them any loose talk of defunding or abolishing the police, along with all other radical demands made by the Black Lives Matter movement – something they have had considerable difficulty with, as American police keep shooting people for no good reason.

If Rayner and Starmer wish to prevent a similar discourse from taking root in the UK – one which prompts people to ask whether police should be beholden to the society they supposedly serve, or if they are an institution that should be feared and opposed by ordinary people – the last thing they should encourage is for police officers to act like an occupying force.

If she had an ounce of political nous, Rayner would be trying to fool the public into considering the police their friends, as opposed to a licensed paramilitary that might put a bullet in the back of your head if you fit the right profile. It likely wouldn’t work – Britain is not short of communities whose distrust of cops is entirely empirical – but it would make more sense than her current pose.

If Rayner gets the kind of bloodthirsty policing she desires, however, the questions she and those who echo her "hardline" stance will have to answer might not come as late as they would like.