It’s hard not to admire Angela Rayner. Her backstory is almost cinematic – bullied kid growing up poor in Stockport, Manchester, told she would never amount to anything, illiterate mentally ill mother who she cared for from the age of ten. Pregnant at 16, deputy leader of the Labour Party by 40.
She doesn’t have a single GCSE and her thrilling pivot from Corbyn’s hard left comrade to deputy for straight-laced centrist Keir Starmer, must have taken a lot of hard graft and grit. I love a woman with ambition.
She’s got bags of charisma with her vapes, venom cocktails, her straight way of talking and blazing red hair, and is pleasingly combative at Prime Minister’s Questions when she stands in for Starmer. I can only imagine the snobbery she has encountered on her stratospheric rise.
But for six weeks now this fiasco over her financial affairs has cantered on, and her increasingly belligerent position of nothing to see here is wearing a little thin.
David Lammy came out all guns blazing for her at the weekend asking why people were scrutinising the affairs of a ‘Northern woman’ and called questions over the propriety of Rayner’s financial affairs “smears”. On many levels, that seems a little rum.
The whole scandal revolves around two right to buy council houses Rayner and her ex-husband owned in Stockport. Rayner’s claim that her “principal property” was a house where she lived separately from her husband and two sons for five years after her marriage, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, stretches credulity. It was revealed at the weekend that one of the photos she posted on social media at the time had the caption “just got home” at the property she claims not to have lived in. When she re-registered the birth of her two younger children she gave that address.
She was exempt from capital gains tax on the £48,500 she made from the sale of the Stockport council house in 2015 because it was, according to her, her primary residence.
She could also have earned a 25 per cent single-occupancy discount on her council tax.
Awkwardly, neighbours at the property she claims was her primary residence say her brother lived there and she was the landlady, something she entirely denies.
Fleet Street’s finest have spent weeks trying to talk to her brother, Darren Bowen and ask him if he lived at what she described as her “primary residence” permanently and if he paid rent. If it turns out he did live there and he did pay rent, this will be a resigning matter.
If Rayner is soon to be in one of the highest offices in the land, don’t we all have a right to understand what is really going on?
The likely capital gains tax she should have paid on the property if it wasn’t her primary residence is around £1,500. Hardly a huge sum, you might say. But this all matters. Honesty matters.
It’s bad enough that Rayner rails against the flagship Thatcherite scheme right to buy, complaining — with justification — that it is “helping to fuel the housing crisis” by depleting council housing stock, but she owned one council house, bought at a discounted rate, while her husband owned another. That’s not great is it?
She has repeatedly raged at the Tories (who she memorably called “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile ... banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian ... piece of scum”) and has, quite rightly, never held back from demanding total transparency over their tax affairs. In the past she has campaigned vociferously for others to make their tax affairs public and demanded Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, answer detailed questions about her tax affairs just before Sunak became Prime Minister. In that case, the privacy of politicians’ families was most definitely not deemed important. So why is it now?
In contrast, Rayner has refused to publish the tax advice which she claims exonerates her. Starmer admits he hasn’t seen it, but says he has full confidence in her.
Starmer repeatedly says he will lead a mission-driven government where integrity will be restored to British politics. If Rayner is soon to be in one of the highest offices in the land, don’t we all have a right to understand what is really going on?
