Voters unlikely to be influenced by Rayner’s taxes

As we go about our daily business today, I can pretty well guarantee that the one thing which won’t disturb our equilibrium is fulminating outrage over whether Angela Rayner owes the taxman 1,500 quid or not.

You’ll have seen that the deputy leader of the Labour Party has been in the headlines a lot, mainly in the newspapers that are less than friendly towards Labour.

The issue (for those who may have forgotten, or are not interested) is whether Rayner paid capital gains tax (CGT) on the sale of her terraced house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, in 2015.

She had bought the former council house eight years previously (long before she was an MP) for £79,000 and sold it for £127,500, making a £48,500 profit.

In the history of buying and selling houses, it has to be admitted that these are not huge sums, but there remains the question as to whether Rayner was liable for CGT on the sale, which rests on whether it was her principal residence.

If this was the case, no CGT – estimated at £1,500, – would be payable. But she may have been living primarily with her now ex-husband at the time, in which case the tax was due.

Either way, we can probably agree that it’s not a big deal, in any sense of the term.

Except that it has become a big deal. Sufficiently important to have been on mainstream news, to have raised questions about her probity, and that of Sir Keir Starmer, and, incredibly, to have a dozen or so police investigating it plus whether Rayner gave false information for the electoral register.

It may be instructive to understand how the story came to light. In a biography of Rayner written by Michael Ashcroft, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, it is suggested that “a series of questions” remain over the precise details surrounding the Vicarage Road sale.

Rayner vehemently denies that she behaved illegally, but Ashcroft’s tale caught alight in The Mail on Sunday and eventually engulfed much of the national media.

Ashcroft has had his own run-ins with the press over his tax affairs. Worth an estimated £850m, he domiciled himself in Belize, beyond the remit of the UK taxman. Our Prime Minister has had to answer questions about his wife’s tax affairs. And Nadhim Zahawi was sacked last year as Conservative Party chairman for failing to officially declare he had settled a bill for tax avoidance while a minister.

It is, of course, convenient for the Tories to have Rayner in the public stocks, if only to take away from their own, time-honoured financial and tax scandals.

Rayner (inset) is not part of any recognisable tribe at Westminster, and her back story – deep poverty, teenage pregnancy, left school at 16 – is atypical for an MP. It is hard to avoid the impression that there is some snobbery attached to the treatment of Rayner.

So, will this story play with the voters? Not enough, I fear, to get the Tories out of trouble. Given how small the alleged offence is, few people outside Westminster care. Or at least care a lot less than the political class would have us believe.