Ange knows she’s bang to rights. But what this story really shows is the hypocrisy at the rotten heart of Starmer’s Labour

The last time I saw Angela Rayner she was lunching with ‘Lord’ Mandelson. They were sitting sidesaddle, not face-to-face. Ange was leaning in like a lovesick schoolgirl, hanging on the great man’s every word.

Naturally, I assumed she was absorbing the legendary political wisdom of this self- styled Sultan of Spin. Mandy has spent decades dining out on his entirely false reputation as the evil genius who single-handedly invented New Labour.

Now I’m not so sure. Ange is up to her oxters in scandal over her housing arrangements, amid firm evidence that she avoided paying capital gains tax and lied about her actual address in direct contravention of electoral law.

If there’s one politician who knows all about telling porkies over housing and avoiding tax, it’s the odious Peter Aloysius Mandelson.

his first fall from grace, little more than a year after Labour’s landslide election victory in 1997, came when he was exposed for borrowing £373,000 from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson and then lying to his mortgage lender to obtain another £150,000 to buy a house he otherwise couldn’t possibly afford.

Anyone else caught in those circumstances would have attracted the attention of the Fraud Squad and probably ended up in prison. Mandelson lost his job, was forced to pay back the money and sell the house — but he pocketed the £250,000 profit.

That wasn’t the last of it, either. After Mandelson was brought back into Cabinet by Tony Blair with indecent haste, The Mail on Sunday discovered that he’d managed to avoid stamp duty on his new flat.

Chancellor Gordon Brown had just introduced a higher-rate tax on purchases over £250,000. To get round this, Mandelson registered his purchase price as £249,000 — less than he actually paid — and ‘apportioned’ another few thousand quid on ‘fixtures and fittings’ to save himself having to pay £3,700 to the Inland Revenue.

AT The time, that would have made his kitchen units some of the most expensive in London, even though they looked like something out of early episodes of Coronation Street.

There was also mystery over where he subsequently obtained the money to buy a £2.4 million home in fashionable Primrose hill. his explanation about a legacy from his father and, perhaps, a postal order from a long-lost relative in Australia didn’t add up, even on back-of-the envelope calculations.

Today, his ermine-clad Lordship lives in a grand pile next to London’s Regent’s Park, conservatively valued at the thick end of £10 million. Don’t ask.

I’m not suggesting that the sins of Angela Rayner are on the same scale of those of Mandelson. he’s always had an appetite for the high life, seeking out the company and patronage of the super-rich and filling his coffers ‘ advising’ dubious foreign dictators and tyrants.

While Mandelson is most at home on the poop deck of an oligarch’s multi-million dollar yacht, you’re more likely to find Ange on the lash at an Ayia Napa disco.

There’s almost something quite endearing about this authentic representative of the Northern working class, particularly when contrasted with the smug, self-entitled North London luvvies, lawyers and public sector poobahs who dominate the modern Labour Party.

But that doesn’t excuse Rayner’s shameful evasion over her housing arrangements. Once again, as in the notorious case of Mandelson, we have The Mail on Sunday to thank for exposing the truth.

The sums involved are relatively trifling, but the principle is equally, if not more, important. In a nutshell, Rayner claimed to be living in one property — a former council semi in Vicarage Road, Stockport, which she bought under Mrs Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation, to which Labour was bitterly opposed — while actually living in another, larger house owned by her husband in nearby Lowndes Lane.

The significance of this is that when she sold the semi, at a £48,500 profit, she would have been liable to pay capital gains tax as it was not her principal home.

By putting a false address on her voter registration form she was also breaking electoral law, an especially serious offence by someone who aspires to be the country’s Deputy Prime Minister.

Yet for six weeks since our sister paper published the first revelations, contained in Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Rayner, she has lied, dissembled and even attempted to portray herself as the victim of a media smear campaign. She has continued to insist that she lived at the house, despite neighbours who testify that she was sub-letting the property to her brother.

The truth will always out. And Rayner, like so many before her, has been damned by the evidence of her own social media account. The MoS has forensically combed through 30 of her entries on Facebook and what most of us still call Twitter.

Ange couldn’t resist posting the banal minutiae of her life online, proving that she lived at Lowndes Lane. In October 2014 she posted a picture of a spider, commenting: ‘This bad boy ran across the bathroom floor as I was on the throne.’ That’s an image I wish I hadn’t read and am now struggling to erase from my consciousness. But it is cast-iron proof that she was living at Lowndes Lanes, as are other posts featuring her cats Woozle and Tilly. In all of these posts, the wallpaper, furniture and cushions are all identical to those in Lowndes Lane.

Ange knows she’s bang to rights. her wisest course would have been to put her hands up, pay a couple of grand in capital gains tax and admit that her false entry on the electoral roll was a simple administrative error for which she had since apologised.

Instead she chose to front it out, pretending on the BBC’s Newsnight that: ‘It’s a non-story manufactured to smear me.’

except it wasn’t, as The Mail on Sunday has now proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The real significance of this story is the fact that it strips bare the glaring hypocrisy and entitlement at the rotten heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Whenever the Conservatives have been in trouble, Ange has been deployed in full fishwife mode to trash them. She has demanded that assorted Tories, and even the Prime Minister’s wife, come clean about their own tax returns. Memorably she described all Tories as ‘scum’.

Yet now she’s been caught up in scandal, Labour is circling the wagons. For weeks we have been told there’s nothing to see here, move along, a fiction which has been maintained by Left-leaning media outlets.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy yesterday claimed preposterously that she had ‘played by the rules’ and enjoyed Labour’s full support. Rayner was merely an unwitting victim of circumstances. These were the kind of things which happen in modern ‘blended’ families. It’s complicated.

She continues to insist that she has received legal advice telling her she had done nothing wrong, but refuses to publish it. And, as I wrote last week, her leader Starmer — who never misses an opportunity to remind us of his distinguished legal career — believes her, even though he hasn’t actually read the alleged advice. Isn’t he in the slightest bit curious?

Sadly, this grubby little business has also illustrated the lack of propriety and morality we can expect from an incoming Starmer government.

At least when Mandelson was caught out in a lie over his mortgage, with his trousers marooned round his ankles and a smoking gun in his hand, Blair didn’t hesitate in sacking him, even if he did bring him back at the first available opportunity.

If Starmer had a shred of decency, he’d dump Rayner today.

She could always console herself with the Mandelsonian precedent. After a brief spell in the wilderness she’d be back on the front bench and in a few years’ time she could be ‘Lady’ Rayner, living not in an former council semi in Stockport but a £ 10 million mansion in Regent’s Park.

For now though, she’s not out of the woods. Greater Manchester Police and HMRC are on her case, thanks to the perseverance of the MoS and, unlikely as it may seem, could still face criminal charges.

Get your coat, girl. You’re nicked.