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.
