FORMER Housing Secretary Angela Rayner told Sir Keir Starmer to “pick more fights” with landlords days after she said Labour was “running out of time.”

She warned in a speech on Monday night that it “was difficult out there” for her party as she asked the Prime Minister to be more combative with freeholders.

“[Renters] feel that nobody understands and cares about the difficulties they go through,” she said at the fundraising dinner in central London.

“This isn’t just people who you would naturally associate with struggling, naturally associate with poverty,” she said.

“But these are professional people, people that are working really hard, people that have got two, three jobs, and they’re still not able to get to the end of the month with their wage packet.

“And they need to know they’ve got a government on their side, and they’re impatient for change and I understand their impatience. So I think we have to pick more fights, personally.”

Her comments come less than a week after she told a meeting for soft-left Labour pressure group Mainstream: “There’s no safe ground for us, and we’re running out of time.”

The former deputy PM resigned in September last year after it was revealed she had not paid stamp duty on her second home in Hove.

London Renters Union spokesperson Jae Vail told the Star: “Labour is haemorrhaging support across the country over its pro-landlord, pro-developer stance on the housing crisis.

“If the government wants to win any of that support back, it must take on landlords and put our right to a good home first.

“That means introducing rent controls that bring down housing costs and investing in the council homes we need to end the housing crisis for good.”