Labour must learn from the Rayner affair – it can’t avoid scrutiny

THERE is now irrefutable evidence, from Angela Rayner’s own social media account, of where she was actually living and what she called ‘home’ in the years after she bought her council house (at a discount) under Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ rules.

Our investigation proves the original claims we made about the Labour Deputy Leader’s complex property arrangements. The issue of when she lived in her house, and when she didn’t, and so whether she was liable for capital gains tax, ought now to be closed.

What we have been saying for 43 days has been proved true. What the indignant Ms Rayner has been saying for 43 days is wrong.

Her attempts to deny our story have been exploded, and the initial reluctance of the BBC and other Left-wing media to get involved in this important issue has been shown up as mistaken.

Crucially, too, the weak behaviour of Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer is also spotlighted. He loves to portray himself as the tough and fearless pursuer of wrongdoing when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. But on this occasion he seems much more afraid of his party’s Left-wing than he was dedicated to righting wrongs.

How ironic that Ms Rayner herself is the source of the truth about her living arrangements. Unwittingly, she publicly supplied the evidence. She has been betrayed by the social media account which she used to show off her daily domestic routine – with pictures and commentaries that showed her living contentedly in a house where she has vociferously insisted for six weeks that she wasn’t living.

No one has suggested deliberate deception. However, while not Watergate, this is still embarrassing for someone who believes she’ll shortly be Deputy Prime Minister.

The controversy would surely have dissipated if, at the start, she had admitted some confusion and got the moral high ground by giving a donation to a homeless charity. But she didn’t.

There is a lesson here for others, too. It is a telling reflection on how much of our lives we thoughtlessly give away if we venture on to social media, and how everything lingers on the internet.

No doubt Ms Rayner and many others in public life will be more cautious in future about what they share. The story is also a lesson to those in Westminster about why they should not attack opponents or demand personal details of the finances of opponents.

For it was objectionable how Ms Rayner demanded Rishi Sunak’s wife answer detailed questions about her own tax affairs, how she campaigned for Nadhim Zahawi, a former chancellor, to ‘come clean’ over the penalty he paid to HMRC, and how she called for a Tory candidate, who had lived in the Cayman Islands, to publish her full tax returns.

We will say it again, because it needs stressing.

This is nothing personal about Ms Rayner. The Mail on

Sunday believes strongly in vigorous democracy. In such a democracy, tough, outspoken people such as she are valuable and important. She speaks for a significant part of the population who have not shared fully in the prosperity of modern times and whose lives are often still very hard despite an extensive welfare state.

But those who rise, as she has, to a position of great eminence, cannot avoid scrutiny or be excused from the tedious rules that the rest of us must obey, any more than the privileged can.

Ms Rayner, of all people, should see this.

The old-fashioned Left, to which she proudly belongs, is very critical of many kinds of privilege, but there is one kind it all too often fails to condemn – the privilege of the Left-wing elite themselves.

Let us hope Labour has learned from this episode.