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It didn’t take them long to find her. Spray-painted on the wall outside Angela Rayner’s new flat in Hove, East Sussex, in purple, red and yellow, the graffiti variously read “Tax evader Rayner” and “Bitch”.
Politics comes scarily close to home these days, and that in turn makes politicians much more wary than they used to be of revealing anything about their home lives. Keir Starmer’s old house was subjected to an alleged arson attack, the man who ultimately murdered the Tory MP David Amess had previously staked out Michael Gove’s family home, and three years ago a man was jailed for telling Rayner that he knew where she lived so she had better “watch your back and your kids”. That’s not an excuse for how the deputy prime minister may have reacted when journalists started sniffing around her new post-divorce life by the sea, leading to pictures of the Hove flat and her children’s family home in Ashton-under-Lyne appearing in the papers, and ultimately to her having to lift a court order protecting the privacy of her disabled son in order to explain exactly how she ended up apparently underpaying £40,000 in stamp duty on the new flat.
Politicians must be accountable, as Rayner herself acknowledged, which remains true even if accountability means getting photographed drinking wine on the beach in your Dryrobe by an amused Daily Mail reader, journalists figuring out that you now live there, followed by the excruciating public unravelling of custody arrangements and post-divorce provision for a child with profound special needs. But a little accountability is long overdue, too, for all those who have remorselessly ratcheted up the temperature in British politics to the point of someone scrawling “Bitch” on the deputy prime minister’s home.
All that said, a Labour housing secretary who has famously advocated for higher taxes getting her own taxes wrong – even if it was by mistake, as she claims, after faithfully following legal advice that has since been contradicted by a specialist tax lawyer – weeks before a likely tax-raising budget looks objectively terrible, and more so given it’s only months since the junior housing minister Rushanara Ali quit after she allegedly evicted tenants from her rental property and then hiked the rent. If a forthcoming investigation by the ministerial ethics watchdog finds Rayner deliberately avoided any form of tax – for some are already questioning the inheritance tax implications of the family trust created to look after a compensation payout for her disabled son, to which she sold her stake in the family home before using the proceeds to buy in Hove – then she will simply have to go.
But if the verdict is anything less cut and dried than vindication or damnation, then her future will depend in large part on how Downing Street thinks the nation feels not just about taxes or integrity in public life, or difficult personal lives, but about Rayner herself. And that’s not a simple question.
Her famously tough and scrappy start in life means she evokes both outrageous snobbery in some quarters and admiration for what she’s overcome in others. The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, strikingly refused to call for her resignation, saying his and his wife’s biggest worry was providing for their own disabled son’s care after they have gone, and there will undoubtedly be much sympathy among parents caught in equally sad and complex situations. But some parents will get no further than the words “family trust” before bitterly concluding that her life is nothing like theirs. Some will see a witch-hunt, others a comeuppance. Rayner herself looked distraught in parliament on Wednesday, sitting pale and mute as the prime minister some had expected her one day to usurp rose to her defence.
Until very recently, Rayner was viewed as the rising power in the cabinet, with colleagues noting that when she asks for something, she usually gets it. Popular with members, powerfully networked in the union movement and boasting her own elected mandate as deputy leader, it was long assumed that if Starmer fell under a bus, the race would be between her, Wes Streeting, and perhaps Andy Burnham. But now that balance of power in that quartet is shifting – though the other three all came out swinging on her behalf this week.
Last year’s confected nonsense of a row over her supposedly failing to pay capital gains tax on the sale of her old council house years ago ended in her vindication, with HMRC concluding that she didn’t actually owe them a penny. But it should have put her on her guard when buying her new flat. Sure enough, journalists who started sniffing around in Hove zeroed in very quickly on whether she had paid enough stamp duty, given that second homes attract higher rates. Why had she declared the old family house in Greater Manchester – which she no longer owns but where she still spends time with the children under a custody agreement designed to minimise upheaval – and not Hove as her main residence for council tax, but vice versa for stamp duty? What about the government flat in Admiralty Arch that she is also entitled to use? That she couldn’t swiftly produce a clear explanation – even though the process was complicated by the court order protecting her son – may leave some erstwhile backers wondering if she is really ready for the scrutiny that comes with the very highest office.
Her survival now hinges on proving she took all possible steps to get the tax right at the time. As someone currently in the throes of a considerably more bog-standard house move, all I’ll say is that there’s a reason people say it’s almost as stressful as bereavement, and I’m not simultaneously trying to run a country. But assuming the story she has told holds water, Rayner could still be more asset than liability to a Labour party that is painfully short of charisma.
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Yet even if she is cleared, she has some difficult decisions to make. She will need to come to terms with the fact that this is essentially her life now: that her opponents in and out of the party will never stop pulling at any loose thread they find – in her finances or her relationship with the former Labour MP Sam Tarry, or the family of whom she is understandably so protective – and that she must be ready for it. Politics would be a smaller, sadder, duller thing without her. But only she can decide if the prize is worth it.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
