Angela Rayner: did she commit tax fraud?

Angela Rayner unnerves the Tories, said Adam Boulton in The i Paper. In an "otherwise austere Labour leadership team", the party's deputy leader stands out for her charisma and remarkable backstory. 

Raised by an illiterate, disabled mother, she left school at 16, with no qualifications, to care for her own baby, and later worked in social care before becoming a trade union official. Rayner is not some "dismal, hair-shirted, middle-class lefty". She's lively, authentic and "unembarrassedly aspirational". 

When the then deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, mocked her in the Commons as a "champagne socialist" for accepting an invitation to Glyndebourne, she retorted that The Marriage of Figaro was "the story of a working-class woman who gets the better of a privileged but dim-witted villain". No wonder Tory critics are so desperate to bring Rayner down over claims that she dodged tax on the sale of her former council house.

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'The claims seem credible'

The claims – which emerged in a new unofficial biography of Rayner by the Tory peer Michael Ashcroft – seem credible, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. Rayner was exempted from paying capital gains tax on the £48,500 profit she made from the sale of her Stockport council house in 2015 because – according to the electoral roll – it was her primary residence. Yet the primary residence of her children and husband, whom she married in 2010, was another house a mile away.

Did Rayner really live apart from her family for the first five years of her marriage? Not according to neighbours: they say her brother lived in the sold house. Rayner insists she has private tax advice clearing her of any wrongdoing. Stockport Council and Greater Manchester Police are assessing whether she committed electoral or tax fraud.

'If you dish it, you need to be able to take it'

As such rows go, this is very small beer, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. We're talking about perhaps £1,500 of possibly unpaid tax, which is nothing compared with the £5m the former Tory chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, was "careless" to overlook. Given the amount of "snobbery and misogyny" Rayner must have faced over her political career, it's tempting to dismiss the whole story as just a smear campaign.

But if Rayner did indeed screw up over her house sale – and the facts look pretty damning – she should come clean. She is the first to attack political opponents over any sign of impropriety. "If you dish it, you need to be able to take it. You can't just scream 'Tory scum'." That Rayner is still insisting, implausibly, on her complete innocence and deflecting questions with anti-Tory rhetoric suggests she may not be such an asset to Labour after all.