The chancellor Rachel Reeves’s defence for breaking the law is that she made an “inadvertent mistake”. She did not know, she told Sir Keir Starmer, that she was supposed to buy a licence to rent out her home in south London when she and her family moved into Downing Street.
Except the next day, it emerged that her husband, who had dealt with the letting agent, was told about the requirement for a licence. Not only had she broken the law, but she had misled the prime minister about it. “Inadvertently”, of course.
