𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Well that was all pretty unedifying, not to say messy. Thank God for a free press. It took weeks of steadily mounting front-page disclosures over Angela Rayner’s property dealings before her fingernails were finally prised from three desks –deputy Labour leader, Deputy Prime Minister, and Housing Secretary. In the end it took a snappily-delivered report into the whole business by Sir Laurie Magnus, Sir Keir Starmer’s independent adviser on ministers’ interests, to do the prising.

Rayner had breached the ministerial code, he ruled yesterday. She hadn’t asked enough questions of the right experts about how much stamp duty was owing on her newly-purchased £800,000 flat in Hove. Hence the £40,000 shortfall. Hence, as of yesterday, the job shortfall.

Of course it’s one third of that job that’s the specific problem: Housing Secretary. Of all the balls Rayner could have dropped, failing to pay her due whack of stamp duty is politically the equivalent of allowing a cannonball to land on her foot.

As she made her belated confession to Sky News’s Beth Rigby, you could practically hear the bones crunching. Personally I thought her fate was sealed from that moment. For a Housing Secretary to underpay – MASSIVELY underpay – housing tax… well…

Starmer’s defence of Rayner during Prime Minister’s Questions later that same day was almost bizarre when he said, with a flourish, that his aide de camp “has come from a working-class background to be Deputy Prime Minister of this country.”

Uhh? What’s that got to do with anything? Are people with working-class backgrounds excused stamp duty, or other taxes, by virtue of their birthright? First I heard of it. I come from Romford, part of London’s wider East End. Perhaps I could negotiate a cut in one of my taxes on that basis.

There will be some who simply don’t like Rayner (or her politics) who will relish her downfall. I’m not one of them. I’ve interviewed her and bumped into her privately and I like her. She’s been a breath of fresh air in the stuffy room of Westminster politics, approachable and funny. She is clearly intelligent and I’m truly surprised she’s managed to screw up her private affairs so royally.

Perhaps if she’d headed up a different ministry… but rather like a deputy chief constable caught speeding on the motorway who blames a faulty satnav, it’s the juxtaposition of the job and the offence that jars.

How could Rayner make a speech attacking property tax dodgers again? Or any tax dodgers, come to that? But at 45 she’s young for a high-flying politician. A period munching grass, and my pound to your penny says she’ll be back.