RAYNER RESIGNS AS DEPUTY PM: Turns out there’s one rule for everybody

Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has resigned.

It was almost inevitable last night, once the solicitors she used for the purchase of her £800,000 Hove house started pushing back.

They felt scapegoated on her explanation for admitting she had under paid the stamp duty to the tune of £40,000. She said she was given the wrong advice, they said they were not informed of the Trust she had – you know what – it is complicated and actually never mind the detail, because it’s not the point of why it’s come to this.

It’s not the tax so much as the hypocrisy.

When the dust settles this moment will be filed under ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’. I said it a year ago as skeletons in donated suits and glasses came out of Starmer’s cupboard. It’s always the hypocrisy that kills you.

Whilst defending Rayner, the Prime Minister suggested his government was a million miles from Boris Johnson’s. Well having lost Haigh, Ali, Siddiq, and Rayner to personal scandals in just a year the public might well argue they are lot closer than he thinks.

This is not to excuse any Tory who got mired in a scandal. It never ceases to amaze me what some people think they can get away with in politics but Rayner has fallen because of context.

Angela Rayner doesn’t like the Tories, she never has, and that is entirely her right to think that. We were at some point ‘scum’ to her.

In one of many social media postings that has come back to bite her, and in response to Conservative supporter Emily Hewertson she once wrote:

“The classic sickening Tory stereotyping and prejudice I have fought all my life. The Tories claim to support aspiration but they sneer and look down their noses at working class people, sheer arrogance, snobbery and entitlement shining through, they cannot help themselves”

For what it’s worth, I’ve rarely met a Tory that actually does sneer at the working class, and I wouldn’t like it if they did. It was Labour’s Emily Thornberry who had to resign for accusations of doing that.

However, given this revealing lifelong political lens, the context to her fall from one of the highest of peaks of politics is probably the endless repetition of “one rule for us, and one rule for them” aimed at the Conservatives.

It became her brand slogan. Her ‘mic drop burn’.

It turns out, in a week bookended at the start by the Prime Minister attacking her critics as ‘sexist and classist’, and at the end by accepting her resignation that there is, in fact – one rule for everybody.

As to outcomes – her departure, in order not to be a distraction to the business of government, after a week of being a distraction from the business of government, will be to make the business of government harder.

The Conservatives have long asserted that Rachel Reeves, who’s fate seemed more in doubt than Rayner’s two months ago, will have to put up taxes in November’s Budget. Tax rises to fill the black holes she is so fond of discussing, that she created herself. Having burdened employers with an eye watering tax rise in the last Budget, she will have to come back with more, having said she wouldn’t, and now, having lost the Deputy Prime Minister because she underpaid her taxes.

Labour’s very newly appointed Comms team have landed one hell of a challenge there.

The irony here is if Angela Rayner had not been a central part of a Labour opposition promising to be whiter than white, to observe the highest standards in public life and with a career of targeting Tories for the slightest hint of impropriety, the tax issue itself might actually have been weathered.

The slow onion peeling of the truth, and accelerated digging by journalists was driven by that context – and to the point she had to go.

The worse news for Labour, is that Angela Rayner is still admired by many in that party, and a number outside it. I know Tories that before last week either quite liked her strong character, or saw her as an underestimated threat.

I don’t think she’s done just yet.

A political fightback on the back benches – after a sensible period of keeping her titian head down – could make Starmer’s job even harder than he’s already made it himself.

But for the time being, she’s gone.

I doubt right now she can even head off to hunker down in Hove in a house she’s probably bitterly regretting ever buying.