By ignoring the Angela Rayner council house row, is the BBC preparing to go back to being the official wing of the Labour Party?

PRETEND for a moment that Angela Rayner is deputy prime minister in this Conservative government rather than shadow deputy prime minister, which is what she is.

It admittedly takes a leap of imagination, given that only a few years ago she described Tories as ‘scum’. In fact, she went further, calling them ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic, nasty and vile’.

Nevertheless, let us proceed with the conceit that Mrs Rayner is a very senior Tory. And let us imagine that she was accused of possibly avoiding capital gains tax on the sale of a house, ignoring electoral law and flouting mortgage rules.

These are the very charges that have been laid at her door following revelations in a new biography of Mrs Rayner by the former Tory peer and businessman Michael Ashcroft, which will be serialised in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday this weekend.

We can be certain that, in the alternative universe I have conjured up, a Tory Angela Rayner would be scrutinised by the BBC, ITV News and Sky. They would go to town, just as they are doing – rightly – in the case of Frank Hester, the Conservative donor alleged to have made racist remarks about MP Diane Abbott.

Radio 4 Today programme’s Nick Robinson would whip himself into a state of indignation. BBC Two’s Newsnight would devote hours to the scandal. Mrs Rayner’s misdeeds would dominate Auntie’s television and radio bulletins. In short, there would be fireworks.

And yet the BBC and other mainstream broadcasters have shown almost no interest in the allegations against Mrs Rayner as she really is – the deputy leader of the Labour Party, which seems very likely to form the next government of the United Kingdom.

THE controversy has scarcely been mentioned, if at all, by the BBC in any of its numerous news bulletins since the allegations against Mrs Rayner emerged two and a half weeks ago, though there have been a couple of brief pieces on its website. As far as the Beeb is concerned, it is a non-story.

This is a grave failure since the issue here is the truthfulness of someone who may well soon be deputy prime minister of this country. None of the charges against Mrs Rayner in my view amounts to a knockout blow. But collectively they call into question her veracity. That is a serious matter.

It is a somewhat involved tale, but can be easily enough boiled down to its essential elements. In 2007, Angela Rayner (then Bowen) bought her own former council house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, Greater Manchester, with a 25 per cent discount.

This was done under the right-to-buy scheme set up by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, which Mrs Rayner has partially criticised as an MP. Residents who buy ex- council houses are normally expected to live in them for a minimum of five years. If a house is sold before this period has ended, there may be a financial penalty.

In 2010, she married Mark Rayner, who had a house in Lowndes Lane about a mile away. Mrs Rayner contends that she continued to live in her own house throughout her marriage. She remained on the electoral roll at that address. Yet when she registered the births of her two youngest children in the same year, she gave their address as Mark Rayner’s property in Lowndes Lane.

Moreover, three neighbours in Lowndes Lane say that Mrs Rayner lived there with her husband and children. One of them, Sylvia Hampson (a former Labour voter), remembers her ‘all the time, coming and going’ and living in the house ‘for six or seven years’. She recalls Mrs Rayner and her husband ‘had the kerb lowered so they could drive a car straight into their driveway’.

Angela Rayner sold her own house in Vicarage Road in 2015, making a profit of £48,500 on the original purchase price. That same year she became an MP.

There are several key questions. Whether or not she lived in her husband’s house, she should probably have paid some capital gains tax on the sale of her own house since a married couple are not entitled to capital gains exemption on two residences. Mrs Rayner asserts that no such tax was payable.

Among other questions are these: Did Angela Rayner pretend to live in Vicarage Road to avoid being penalised by Stockport Council, under right-tobuy rules, for moving out before five years had elapsed? Did she tell her mortgage provider she was no longer resident in Vicarage Road, as she was legally required to do? Did she break electoral rules by not declaring her true address?

There’s a further oddity. During the period of her marriage, Mrs Rayner’s brother Darren was registered as living with her husband in Lowndes Lane. However, witnesses have told the Mail that Darren lived in Vicarage Road. Did he pay Mrs Rayner rent and, if so, was this declared?

As I say, none of these accusations is lethal. But nor are they trivial, and collectively they point to a significant lapse.

ANGELA Rayner – who by the way was ferocious in impugning Boris Johnson’s veracity – has robustly denied any wrongdoing. Until or unless she explains several anomalies, reasonable people may conclude that she isn’t telling the whole truth.

Except that many reasonable people may be unaware of the allegations since the BBC and other broadcasters have avoided the story. This surely can’t be because they deem it too convoluted. Several newspapers, including the Mail, have got to grips with its complexities.

No, I fear that the Beeb and others have decided that, with a Labour government likely to take over in a matter of months, they don’t want to get on the wrong side of the party hierarchy, and in particular the probable future deputy prime minister. If true, this would amount to a shocking dereliction of their responsibilities.

How well I recall the BBC’s indulgence towards Tony Blair in the early New Labour years. Later, the Corporation and New Labour were at loggerheads over the Iraq War. But there was a time – with the Beeb’s chairman and directorgeneral both paid up Blairites – when our national broadcaster often sounded even more like the official wing of the Labour Party than now. Please God, let us not return to those days.

The honesty of the woman likely to be a powerful politician is a vital issue. Nor is this the first time it has been questioned. In 2022, Labour initially wrongly denied that Angela Rayner had been present at an event in Durham where Sir Keir Starmer was photographed swigging beer. The gathering was in apparent contravention of Covid rules, though local police ruled otherwise.

Similarly, Greater Manchester Police have declared Mrs Rayner won’t face an investigation in this instance. How they could have determined in so short a time that there is no case to answer, and apparently without interviewing witnesses, is a mystery.

A significant aspect of this sorry tale is hypocrisy. Last year Mrs Rayner had the effrontery to call for a review on discounts for right-to-buy, despite being herself a beneficiary of the scheme.

Hypocrisy is bad enough, but if it were to be shown that Angela Rayner had gamed the system, voters would be rightly appalled. Fortunately for her, thanks to the all-powerful BBC, many of them may never know.