So, it’s farewell to Angela Rayner, at once the most interesting, the most flammable and the most catastrophically embarrassing member of the Labour front bench. For better and worse, she was a lightning conductor for Sir Keir Starmer. As his Deputy, she did what deputies aren’t supposed to do, namely, outshine the boss... although it must be said that this isn’t difficult in the case of Sir Keir.
She wasn’t, as she promised, “John Prescott in a skirt”, for Tony Blair’s deputy was never touted as a possible replacement for the PM, as for a time Rayner was. That was the extent of her position in the party - she was talked about as an alternative to Sir Keir as Prime Minister. No longer.
She has gone and she had to go. Even before the publication of Sir Laurie Magnus’s report on her affairs, there were just too many embarrassing questions about her tax situation — and let’s not forget, there were troubling questions about her council tax payments ten years ago, back in 2015 — you’d think after that, she’d have been ultra-scrupulous.
Many of us will be confused over the complexity of her property situation, though even the dimmest of us can discern in her management of her affairs a keenness to make the most of the system for her own gain. That’s not a sin, but thanks to the investigative work of the Telegraph, she has now admitted that she paid £40,000 less than she should have done on her holiday home in Hove (confusingly designated for a time as her primary residence). There are now questions about the generous valuation of her house in Ashton-under-Lyne, given that she sold her share in the property to her son’s trust in order to pay for the property in Hove. More explosively, Kemi Badenoch has raised the question of what Angela Rayer as housing minister knew about proposed changes to property taxes.
And that’s the thing. Angela Rayner was housing minister. As such, she might have been expected to be au fait with the tax implications of her property transactions — or if she wasn’t, she might have led the way in calling for the system to be less damned complicated. That might have done a favour to the rest of us.
Many of us will regret the departure of a woman who was so colourful, so embarrassing and so visible
Of course many of us, myself included, will regret the departure of a woman who was so colourful, so embarrassing, so visible — those startling scarlet dresses, those crimson trouser suits — so mouthy and aggressive. There are umpteen stories about her combative ways, including the mesmerising story, from ten years ago, about her run-in with a Brighton shoeshop which didn’t provide her with the Star Wars-themed shoes she had ordered. She took them to task on House of Commons writing paper, which was crass.
She had more human interest than the rest of the Cabinet combined — not that this is saying much. She did genuinely come from a challenging background, having been a carer for her bipolar mother from the age of 10 and having left school at 16 without a single qualification. There aren’t many frontbenchers who have that kind of experience. A different woman might have used her difficulties to raise school standards to benefit children from similarly challenging backgrounds for she was Education Secretary once. She didn’t.
But the reason it’s hard to shed any tears for Ange is that she was, to my mind, a disastrous Housing minister. Her big claim was that she would achieve Labour’s goal of building 1.5 million houses during this Parliament, come what may. And she did it by dint of riding roughshod over local objections, indeed, making clear that communities could complain as much as they liked about insensitive and intrusive developments but their concerns would be ignored. The provincial towns and cities of England and Wales grew organically and they have an historic shape and character which has been developed over time. Angela had no time for the concerns of heritage organisations; indeed, unforgiveably, she simply abandoned the requirement that new housing estates should have an eye to “beauty” as a criterion … that wasn’t her thing. She was a philistine, and gloried in it.
But there were other aspects of her tenure that were rubbish too. She was a prime mover in the bid to establish a definition of “Islamophobia”, which can only result in curbing free speech in respect of Islam. She was also a prime mover in imposing new rules on business in respect of workers’ rights which will add a formidable extra burden on firms who are already suffering the effects of national insurance increases. In fact those new rules are a disincentive to employers to take on new workers at a time when there is a startling downturn in the number of vacancies. Her record, in short, has been disastrous in parts and unimpressive in others.
And it’s that, not her style, her questionable tax affairs, her perceived venality, which matters. Her departure may be a loss to the fun of politics, but she isn’t a loss when it comes to substance. She has proved too embarrassing to keep, and Sir Keir had no option but to accept her resignation. But let’s not delude ourselves that this turn of events is about her gender or her class; it’s about her judgement and her record. She had to go. And she has no one to blame but herself.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
