Among those nearest to Angela Rayner there is genuine anger, even though they admit she made a mistake that cost her badly.
A source close to the now former deputy prime minister, who resigned amid a scandal over her tax affairs, told The Independent: “Keir [Starmer], Morgan [McSweeney] and the whole cabal will regret what they did to her.
“They won a battle today, but this is going to hurt them. They are actually an existential problem for the Labour Party.”
While the prime minister had outwardly supported Rayner when she admitted to not having paid £40,000 of stamp duty on a flat in Brighton, there was a feeling that he was just waiting for the ethics adviser “to give him an excuse” to wield the knife.
“There has been a ‘get Angela’ campaign running for weeks now,” said one ally of the former deputy leader. “And now they have got her.”
The extent of the reshuffle that followed appeared to confirm that her departure had been planned as part of a much bigger reshape of a failing government that would no longer incorporate a senior figure from the left.
Rayner accepted her fate on Thursday night after ethics adviser Laurie Magnus’s report was sent to her and “support from the prime minister had gone”.
“The stupid thing is that she would probably have got that £40k back in a few months legally,” a supporter despondently noted.
The theory is that she had a target on her back because plotters on the left wanted her to take over from Starmer.
But while speculation had been rife about Rayner being the leadership candidate in a left-wing takeover of the Labour Party, her heart was never completely in it.
Rayner was always a reluctant candidate for Downing Street. A friend told The Independent that for some months she had been considering whether to stand down from frontline politics altogether.
“She wants to be able to go on holiday and not have people taking her picture. She wants to be able to nip down to B&Q without being recognised.”
The intrusion into her personal life resulting from the tax affairs fiasco around her £800,000 Hove flat had, according to friends, “underlined everything she hates about being in the public eye”.
Among her supporters in the trade unions and on the soft left of the Labour Party, who were genuinely plotting Starmer’s downfall with her as their preferred replacement, there were hopes that she might hold on to her job.
But by Friday morning, with an early sight of the report, she felt she had to go. Support from Starmer, which had appeared strong at PMQs on Wednesday, had quietly disappeared.
“She had no choice,” said another friend.
And it meant that she had to resign from everything: not just her housing secretary role, but also as deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party.
“It was untenable for her to continue in any role,” an ally said. “She can at least now go and lick her wounds, and come back from the back benches.”
They added: “She made a mistake, but in the end it was tax avoidance, and it did not meet the ethical level required of government.”
Fellow ministers had lost patience and were saying she should go. One MP suggested: “She is going to be a pain in the proverbial for Keir.”
While Starmer produced a three-page handwritten note in a sign of how much he appreciated her, there is said to have been “bad feeling” between the pair at the end.
Rayner had also been increasingly frustrated at her treatment in government. A proposal to give her an Office of the Deputy Prime Minister never materialised, despite months of negotiations and a memorandum of understanding promising it. Starmer and his chief of staff McSweeney were happy for her to have the title, “but did not want a rival court”.
But those close to Rayner feel that she never received the same level of support she provided to Starmer and McSweeney. In particular, she used her political capital with Labour MPs on the left of the party to prevent a catastrophic defeat in the welfare rebellion ahead of the summer recess.
“Keir is only PM because of what Angela did for him,” said one source close to her. “He never appreciated her.”
Now Starmer is set to find out what life is like without a big figure to rally the left of the party. And Rayner will have more time to “reflect on her mistakes”.
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