'Three Pads' Rayner: a housing hypocrite?

John Prescott was famously nicknamed "Two Jags" because of his love of the luxury motor car – but his tastes were "relatively modest" in comparison with those of the present Deputy Prime Minister, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail.

Angela Rayner, who is also Secretary of State for Housing, is amassing a veritable "property empire", having just purchased an £800,000 seafront flat in trendy Hove. Combine that with Rayner's "handsome, four-bedroom £650,000 detached house" in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, and the three-bedroom, grace-and-favour ministerial apartment that she gets to use at Admiralty House on Whitehall, and the Deputy PM now has "Three Pads" and a "stately" ten bedrooms at her disposal. Not bad for an avowed socialist whose government is "doing its damnedest to make life harder for ordinary homeowners".

There's nothing wrong, of course, with a working-class woman bettering herself, said the Daily Mail. In fact, it is "admirable": Rayner has done "astonishingly well for someone who left school aged 16, pregnant and without qualifications". But the hypocrisy is galling. Labour has demonised second-home owners, punishing many with an extra 100% council tax charge. Rayner's own department argues that they damage communities and price local families out of the market – yet here she is, "expanding her property portfolio".

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So Rayner has bought a flat, said Ben Kentish in The i Paper. And now, like at least a quarter of MPs, she owns a grand total of two properties. As real estate moguls go, "she is hardly Donald Trump". Strange that her Hove flat has received so much more hostile coverage than, say, the actual property empire owned by the Tory MP Jeremy Hunt (he has seven buy-to-let properties in Southampton; plus properties in Pimlico, Surrey and Italy). The whole thing "reeks" of classism.

"This is one of those stories that seems to want to be a scandal", but doesn't quite manage it, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Rayner has never said that she is against second-home ownership. She has vocally supported the double council tax on such homes – which, by the way, was brought in by the last Tory government – believing it will help combat inequality in housing. And she's happy to pay the double tax on the Hove flat. When a person does something they consider to be in the public interest but which personally disadvantages them, we don't generally call it hypocrisy. On the contrary, "we usually hold this to be rather a noble thing".