Angela Rayner – the Papers’ Verdicts

It’s a cliché to recall Harold Wilson’s maxim that “a week is a long time in politics”. But never was that truer than over the last few days, when Labour’s star working-class hero fell on her sword. What already seems like a lifetime ago, but has only been a few days, the Prime Minister was prepared to say this about Angela Rayner:

I am very proud to sit alongside a Deputy Prime Minister who is building 1.5 million homes, who is bringing the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights for a generation, and has come from a working-class background to be Deputy Prime Minister.

The usual routine during after such kamikaze debacles is for colleagues to rally round and heap plaudits while the media and press churn out political obituaries. Here’s a selection of some of the comment.

For the Mail:

Labour was in meltdown on Friday after Angela Rayner’s resignation triggered an emergency reshuffle… The Labour Party is now engaged in a civil war for its deputy leadership. All of which will be an enormous distraction from the problems facing Britain, with the cost of borrowing reaching its highest point in decades, and inflation and unemployment rising.

Katie Hind in the same edition is more personal. She condemns Angela Rayner for being uncouth, haughty and entitled and an insult to working-class women:

The truth is she is nothing but an embarrassment to aspirational working-class women like me. She has let us all down. Instead of treating her position with the dignity it deserves, she has spent her Parliamentary career behaving like an uncouth, haughty, arrogant and deeply unserious hypocrite.

Instead of just stumping up the tax she owed – especially important in a minister who has spent her career railing against the financial affairs and improprieties of her political enemies – she embarked on complicated schemes to hand over as little as possible. Many questions still surround these murky arrangements.

And the stamp duty scandal is, of course, far from the only scuffle she has found herself in. Last year it emerged that she had taken £3,550 worth of free clothes from Lord Alli, along with many of her Labour colleagues, including of course the freebie-obsessed Keir Starmer, who prefers other men to buy his spectacles for him.

Ms Rayner earns about £160,000 a year with generous expenses, a gold-plated pension and funds galore to run her office: why on earth wouldn’t she pay for her own frocks?

The Guardian is more interested in the crisis engulfing Labour:

In his handwritten response, which he signed off “with very best wishes and real sadness”, Starmer said that Rayner would “remain a major figure in our party” and “continue to fight for the causes you care so passionately about”.

But her departure leaves the Labour Government without one of its most authentic – and powerful – working-class voices at a time when it is struggling to reconnect with its traditional voter base and trailing Reform UK in the polls.

For Vicky Spratt in New Statesman, Rayner was a victim of Britain’s housing crisis and divorce rather than anything else and took the opportunity to imply that Nigel Farage fell into a similar trap:

Before her resignation, Rayner maintained that she had acted in good faith. She explained that, during her divorce from her now ex-husband, a trust was set up to ensure her disabled son would always have a home. The money in that trust came from an NHS payout following complications at his birth.

Even eminent tax specialists conceded that they did not know their way around this knotty area of property law, so Rayner may indeed have been telling the truth. Regardless, she is not the first politician to suffer a housing scandal, nor will she be the last. Consider Reform leader Nigel Farage, who said last year that he had bought a home in his new constituency of Clacton, only for it to emerge that it was in his partner’s name, meaning he was not liable for the higher stamp duty rate on additional properties.

Spratt is deeply sympathetic to the position Rayner found herself in:

Like many people, she now has a family home worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. And, when splitting from her ex-husband, as anyone going through a relationship breakdown must, Rayner had to work out how to keep a home for her children, while also ensuring she had a place of her own in which to build a new life.

The cost of housing prevents people from living their lives, encourages tax manoeuvres, drives family disputes, makes it difficult to leave a relationship and holds the economy back. You could not have written this story. The irony is that Rayner – a woman from a truly working-class background who became Housing Secretary – has lost her role because of this policy area.

The Telegraph moved on swiftly to the cabinet reshuffle but also had time to spend on the cost of housing for Angela Rayner, adopting a very different tone to New Statesman:

Official documents show she has a £650,000 mortgage on the seaside flat through NatWest.

The scale of the loan will have left her with mortgage repayments as high as £4,000 a month while her salary against an income [sic] of £5,400 a month after tax. As Deputy Prime Minister she was taking home £8,100.

Following her resignation, she will have just £1,400 a month left over with two teenage children to look after, covering food and clothing bills, gas and electricity, holidays and sundry other costs.

She also has a £40,000 tax bill to pay as well as a likely penalty of £12,000 plus interest on top of about £1,000 – a total bill of £53,000.

The paper took the opportunity to turn the knife in the wound:

Ms Rayner, 45, a mother-of-three, has also been stripped of her grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House. She could rent a flat in London paid for through MPs’ expenses but that will leave her with the Hove apartment to pay for, including expensive train fares to and from the capital.

One personal finance expert told the Telegraph that unexpected tax bills can often result in bankruptcy for those who receive them.

The expert, who did not wish to be named, said: “One of the main reasons people get into financial difficulties, if you were to look specifically at people who have been made bankrupt, often it is a tax bill that will send them over the edge. It’s one of those things that people do fall foul of.”

Conversely, the Independent covered Rayner’s allies raining down fury on the Prime Minister and promising revenge:

Among those nearest to Angela Rayner there is genuine anger, even though they admit she made a mistake that cost her badly.

A source close to the now former Deputy Prime Minister, who resigned amid a scandal over her tax affairs, told the Independent: “Keir [Starmer], Morgan [McSweeney] and the whole cabal will regret what they did to her.

“They won a battle today, but this is going to hurt them. They are actually an existential problem for the Labour Party.”

Apparently, Ms Rayner has been a victim of a conspiracy to destroy her:

“There has been a ‘get Angela’ campaign running for weeks now,” said one ally of the former deputy leader. “And now they have got her.”

The theory is that she had a target on her back because plotters on the Left wanted her to take over from Starmer.

But while speculation had been rife about Rayner being the leadership candidate in a Left-wing takeover of the Labour Party, her heart was never completely in it.

According to friends of Rayner’s quoted in the Independent, she hated high profile public office and everything that went with it. However, the paper claims she had not been accorded the privileges she felt she deserved:

Rayner had also been increasingly frustrated at her treatment in government. A proposal to give her an Office of the Deputy Prime Minister never materialised, despite months of negotiations and a memorandum of understanding promising it. Starmer and his Chief of Staff McSweeney were happy for her to have the title, “but did not want a rival court”.

“Keir is only PM because of what Angela did for him,” said one source close to her. “He never appreciated her.”

Now Starmer is set to find out what life is like without a big figure to rally the Left of the party. And Rayner will have more time to “reflect on her mistakes”.

By Saturday September 5th, barely 24 hours since Rayner’s resignation, most press attention had swung over to the dramatic cabinet reshuffle, bored by revisiting the technicalities of stamp duty and trusts. Whether Rayner, who had disappeared by Friday afternoon as if she had been vapourised, has gone for good or will be reborn from the back benches one day remains to be seen.

Never were the words of Harold Macmillan, when asked what the greatest challenge to a statesman is, more relevant. “Events, dear boy,” he replied. But perhaps another quote of Harold Wilson’s is even more apposite in this instance:

The Labour Party is like a stagecoach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.