Labour’s response is treating the public with utter contempt

It’s always the cover-up that gets you. If shadow deputy PM Angela Rayner had immediately put up her hands and accepted she’d misled HMRC over the sale of her stockport home in 2015, she’d have received a rap on the knuckles and the whole affair would now be a memory, something she had put behind her.

But instead, ever since the story broke in the Mail on sunday six long weeks ago, Rayner has engaged in a sordid and sustained attempt to put one over on the British public. And she has been helped in that regard by the active collusion of Keir starmer’s Labour Party.

Let’s remind ourselves what she is accused of. When in 2015 she sold the excouncil semi she’d bought eight years earlier at a profit of £48,500, she claimed it was her primary residence. Yet all the evidence – including the weekend’s forensic examination by the Mail on sunday of her social media posts dating back to 2014 – show that for five years she had been living at another stockport address with her husband and children.

By claiming she lived at the ex-council house, however, she was able to avoid capital gains tax on the sale, which saved her up to an estimated £3,500. A decent sum – but how trifling it must now appear to her given that it could derail her hard-won political career on the eve of Labour’s expected political coronation.

As I say, if she’d admitted it was an oversight and made amends rather than claiming pathetically that she was the victim of a smear campaign, the whole thing would have blown over.

Now, though, she will forever be marked by her deceit, hypocrisy (as we shall see) and arrogance in believing she can bluff this out.

It is a terrible disappointment. For she is undoubtedly one of Britain’s most charismatic and authentic politicians. Her defiant triumph over adversary – rising from penury on a council estate, and leaving school at 16 with no qualifications and a baby on the way, to become the deputy prime minister in waiting – is a remarkable success story.

But this tawdry saga is not just about her. starmer and his party’s role in this affair is also very murky – and I say this as someone who was a Labour member for decades, only resigning when Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

Yesterday, starmer accused the tories of ‘chasing a smear’ against Rayner, adding that ‘nobody is interested’ in ‘how much time she spent with her husband over ten years ago’. I am sorry, but what they are interested in is whether Rayner deliberately defrauded the taxman and broke electoral rules by claiming a false address, then lied about it. And it is becoming clearer by the day that she did just that.

the Labour leader never stops reminding us that he was Director of Public Prosecutions and therefore one of the most senior lawyers in the country. And yet he has blindly accepted Rayner’s version of events that she took legal advice and no rules were broken. Yesterday, he insisted it would not be appropriate for him to see Rayner’s legal advice.

No one actually thinks starmer believes Rayner’s patchy defence. He is simply trying to avoid a potential calamity that could derail his hitherto smooth electoral campaign.

the great irony is that both starmer and Rayner have repeatedly attacked the tories for not publishing details of their own affairs. ‘there should be no power without accountability, and true accountability requires transparency,’ starmer once crowed.

Last January, Rayner insisted that thenConservative chairman Nadim Zahawi should ‘come clean’ over claims that as Chancellor he had paid a penalty to HMRC as part of a tax settlement. In 2021 she demanded that tory by- election candidate Jill Mortimer, who once lived in the Cayman Islands, should publish her tax returns ‘in full’. And in April 2022 she submitted a series of questions to Rishi sunak about his wife’s tax arrangements.

she is a hypocrite of the highest order and now needs to publish the advice she was given so we can judge its relevance.

For weeks, Labour has tried to pretend that this story was all much ado about nothing. their policy has seemingly been to ignore the storm until it dies out.

At the weekend, when it became evident Rayner had lied thanks to the Mail on sunday, they engaged in a new tactic which treats voters with even more disdain, ludicrously trying to argue that the scandal doesn’t really matter because Labour is in opposition.

speaking on sky News, shadow Foreign secretary David Lammy inevitably dismissed the affair as a smear. then, when asked why Rayner should not publish her tax returns, given that she had called on Rishi sunak to do so, he replied: ‘there’s a different arrangement and expectation for the Prime Minister than there is in this context. We’re not yet in government.’

I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Labour appears to have given up on defending Rayner at all, instead insisting that her gross misdemeanour simply isn’t relevant. Yet how can a fraud perpetrated by the woman who is likely to be our next deputy prime minister not be a matter of national importance?

the polls show Labour is heading for power. It is rightly being scrutinised with a new intensity. Its response so far has not just been inadequate, it’s been offensive – and it treats voters with utter contempt.