So much for Keir’s pledge for honour, integrity and accountability in Labour politics
IN YEARS to come, historians will surely write entire theses on the role of wallpaper in modern British politics. It played its part in the downfall of Boris Johnson. And now it has exposed the lies of Angela Rayner. For the past six weeks, Labour’s deputy leader has claimed that between 2010 and 2015 her ‘home’ was a former council-owned flat in Vicarage Road, Stockport. With increasing anger and self-righteousness, she has insisted that it was not a larger property a mile away on Lowndes Lane occupied by her husband and children.
This was significant, because had she been living in the second property, questions would arise about capital gains tax liability from the sale of her Vicarage Road flat, and whether she had broken the law by putting the wrong address on her electoral roll entry.
So ever since The Mail on Sunday’s revelations, Rayner has tried to bluff it out. She had done nothing wrong, she insisted. She had consulted a tax expert, who had reassured her all was correct. Neighbours who told numerous media organisations that she had been living in Lowndes Lane, not Vicarage Road, were mistaken or mischief-makers.
‘My house was my house at Vicarage Road,’ she declared defiantly.
But Angela Rayner made one fatal mistake. She forgot about the wallpaper.
Or more specifically, she forgot about a tweet she sent at 9.08pm, on October 26, 2014, proudly displaying a picture she owned by Scottish impressionist Alexander Millar. It could easily have been hanging in her flat in Vicarage Road. But the floral print wallpaper surrounding it gives the game away.
It’s the wallpaper that hangs in the property on Lowndes Lane.
There are numerous other tweets. ‘Just got home,’ she posted on April 5, 2014. Again, the property pictured is Lowndes Lane, not Vicarage Road. ‘Just got back from work, and within 5 minutes my cats are on my knee,’ she tweeted. The sofa she’s pictured on is the one in Lowndes Lane, not
Vicarage Road.
AFTER 56 days of dissembling, distortion, duplicity, deceit and denial, we finally have the truth. Angela Rayner’s ‘home’ was on Lowndes Lane all along. And we know this because of the contemporaneous words and tweets of Rayner herself.
Now she’s been caught bang to rights, we can expect Rayner and Labour to begin to shift the goal-posts. First, they will attempt to claim that because of ongoing investigations by the police, HMRC and Stockport Council, they are unable to comment in detail.
Such a stance would be nothing more than a self-serving sham.
When the Met Police investigated Partygate, Labour harried Boris Johnson and the Tory government on the issue week in, week out. There was no pause to allow ‘due process’ to run its course.
A second tactic will be to cry foul and point to the numerous examples of Conservative financial sleaze. The names of Nadhim Zahawi, Michelle Mone and Owen Paterson will undoubtedly be trotted out to try to deflect from Rayner’s mendacity.
But the wrongdoing of each of these high-profile Tories has been fully exposed, and they have paid the appropriate political price. Labour – who are on the brink of power – should not, and will not, get a pass from similar scrutiny.
Then there will be an attempt to brush the whole saga aside as irrelevant Westminster navel-gazing. ‘What does a council flat matter when set aside Gaza, cost-of-living, the small boats crisis’ will be the refrain.
But Angela Rayner, Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour party have become masters at leveraging the trivial into major issues of public probity.
Boris and Carrie Johnson’s own No10 wallpaper. A slice of birthday cake. Rishi Sunak’s £180 coffee mug.
The Rayner house saga matters. And the reason it matters is because she, Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour party have spent the past five years making integrity, transparency and honesty the key dividing line between themselves and their opponents.
Which means it’s time for Sir Keir to put his money where his deputy leader’s mouth is.
The issue isn’t whether Rayner avoided a few thousand pounds of capital gains tax, or technically breached electoral law on registration of her home address. It isn’t even about the fact that as part of her front bench portfolio she has responsibility for both housing policy and election law.
It’s that Rayner was the attack dog who was deployed to savage every Tory MP who crossed the line of political morality drawn by her insufferably pious party.
And yet here she is exposed displaying the same mendacity and hypocrisy she so decried in the Tory party when she branded its members ‘scum’.
When the Commons Privileges Committee delivered its verdict on Boris Johnson, Rayner toured the broadcast studios to declare the former Prime Minister was ‘not only a law-breaker but a liar. He’s not fit for public office. He’s disgraced himself and continues to act like a pound shop Trump’.
Well, Angela Rayner has been proved to be a pound shop Richard Nixon. ‘I am not a crook… there will be no whitewash at Lowndes Lane.’
Ultimately, there wasn’t a whitewash – but only because Rayner’s attempt at one was underdone by her own social media account.
So will Sir Keir Starmer act? Will the man who once solemnly declared: ‘As a matter of principle for me, it’s very important we have honour, integrity and accountability in politics’ take any action against his deputy?
OR WILL those fine words join so many of his other commitments and pledges, and be cast on the bonfire when they cease to be politically expedient? None of this had to happen. If Rayner had come clean at the beginning and volunteered to pay any tax she might have owed, everyone would have moved on.
But, instead, she dug in, piling falsehood upon falsehood.
On BBC2’s Newsnight two weeks ago, she was asked about her Stockport living arrangements. She passionately replied: ‘It’s a non-story manufactured to try and smear me.’
But it wasn’t. And she knew it wasn’t. Because unlike Angela Rayner, the wallpaper doesn’t lie.