Will ‘tax-avoiding’ Rayner stay or go?

0:04The Telegraph.

0:09Angela Rayner. Should she stay or should she go? After she has admitted avoiding tax, the Deputy PM's career hangs in the balance. But can Kemi Badenok also go the distance as leader of the opposition after what's been described as a woeful performance at Prime Minister's questions? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

0:42Tim, it's a tricky one, this, isn't it? And we're wondering what to title this podcast, because if Angela Rayner does end up resigning by the close of play today, then anything where she's still in post looks like it's going to be a little old and stale. And yet my feeling after PMQs, which you've just returned from, is that she might be safe for the next 24 hours. If she does survive, it will be because the Labour Party judges that the Tories are terrible and irrelevant and Nigel Farage is in America. In other words, there isn't the political opposition in place and pressure to push her out. I should add I bumped into a Labour contact who knows things.

1:30It's not just some random person who works in the office. Nice. And he said they are briefing heavily that she made a mistake and that they should give her a second chance and they're not pushing for her to go and he thought she might survive. OK, so we're going to get into the nitty gritty of her mea culpa in just a moment because like all things involving tax, it's complicated. And there are some domestic issues thrown in. It isn't complicated. But anyway, carry on. I mean, I was going to ask you first, though, what was the mood in the House? How did she seem? How did Starmer seem with her? Where's Reeves in all this?

2:10Yeah. So when PMQs began, the press gallery was braced for she's going to go. And if you think about the logic of she has to go, because if nothing else, they're drafting a budget right now that's going to do things around housing and tax. and here you have a housing minister who is accused of avoiding tax on housing. She's in charge of housing. Precisely. So the mood in the chamber was, well, presumably we are watching her last few hours in frontline politics. When she came in, a number of front benches made a point of patting her on the shoulder or giving her a rub. Lucy Powell was the first to do it.

2:42Where were they rubbing her? Rachel Reeves rubbed her coccyx. Rachel, by the way, has had a holiday tan that's gone disastrously wrong. It's so dark, it's offensive. Really? What do we think? It's from a bottle? I don't know. I think she fell asleep under the lamp. Right. OK. The Prime Minister comes in. But Angela came in and as I say, she got these rubs and these nods and things and she just sat impassive. She just looked straightforward. She didn't move. She didn't respond to anything that happened throughout the 30 minutes, which was probably about the right way to play it. And it's what she usually does as well.

3:14How is Sir Keir Starmer with her? Because we know he's got a bit of a woman problem. He's not that touchy-themed. He touched her twice. Oh. And she said, thank you, in a very sort of short, sharp way. Yeah. As if, I'm not sure she was 100 % certain who he was. But she said, thank you. So the front bench looked like they were sticking together. But what we were braced for was Kemi's questions, because this is the definition of an open goal. Isn't it? You have six questions and all you do is hammer, hammer, hammer. How does she explain X? How do you justify Y? what's your budget going to look like given this is going on.

3:51Instead, she asked one question in passing and then moved swiftly on to the budget. I also welcome the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister has referred herself to the ethics advisor. She has admitted she underpaid tax. So why is she still in office? But there is not just a crisis at the very top of his cabinet, Mr Speaker. There is a crisis brewing for the whole country. when was the last time the cost of government borrowing was so high what is she thinking what's going on here tim this is so disappointing from kemi badenock yeah she started badly she rallied a bit before we all broke up for the summer holidays yes i expected her to be back in the saddle yes i mean literally as you say with this open goal in front of her bend it like Beckham for the love of God woman.

4:43I can tell you what's happened. It's all staffing issues. It's the people who are in control of her office. They have an approach to politics which is procedural. They think it's all about being serious. Yes. They have a sense of we do this, this and this. And anything which is a detour from that is silly and not sensible. Now, if you were an advisor worth your weight, you would have come up with some basic bitch lines to throw out, right you just you just turn up the bitch-o-meter right you just go horrible uh instead these people would have said well look mention it but don't dwell on it because because what matters kemi is the budget and i can almost feel the letter of complaint to me from kemi written in anthrax saying the problem with journalists like you is you try and make everything about personalities yes well that's because that's what labour does i mean miriam kate's bless her formerly a tory mp kind of comes out with this, oh, you know, there are special circumstances set up because her son has got disabilities and we really need to...

5:43And I was like, hang on a minute, Angela Rayner literally called you scum five minutes ago. If the roles were reversed, and we know this, particularly with Rayner, who, you know, frankly, doesn't play by Queensbury rules, like the people at CCHQ in the Conservatives, we must mind our P's and Q's. They're so overcautious. You're literally tanking and you have nothing to lose. Will you please be an attack dog rather than the kind of little puppy somebody takes around in a handbag on the tube? What are you thinking, Kemi Badenock? And there are tweets. There are always tweets. People have compiled Angela Rayner's tweets about tax avoidance.

6:20There are dozens of them. She wanted Nadim Zahawi to resign over his own tax affairs. She attacked Jeremy Hunt over his tax affairs. And the bottom line is this. Labour is only in power because of Partygate. That was the issue which defined and galvanised Keir Starmer and his leadership. They weren't doing well. The government was actually supported by much of the public during lockdown. It was party gate that changed the narrative. They brought a government down over cake. Yes. Given that, it is perfectly legitimate to bring one minister down over their tax arrangements. Also, the government, as I pointed out in my column last week, and everyone keeps on, now even Kemi Badenoch using the gaslighting line.

6:59You know, this is a government that keeps on telling outright lies. We're in control of our borders. We are deporting people who arrive here illegally by boat. No, you're not. The numbers are going up. We are doing economically well. Everything's going swimmingly. No, you're not. The economy's tanking. Guilt yields are at an all-time high and the IMF might have to bail us out. So when it comes to being the kind of, you know, government of untruths, I think they're rivaling the Johnson administration quite heartily. I should point out that the Lib Dems didn't go after tax. Instead, Ed Davey asked about Gaza.

7:32The SNP didn't go after tax. The Greens didn't go after tax. All these people had questions. Reform didn't have a question. Nigel Farage is in America, as I say. One Tory MP got up and talked about the impact of tax on pubs and listed all the pubs in his constituency and didn't have the wit to make a joke about Angela Rayner and her pubs. Others got up. One Tory MP got up and asked about Chagos. Another MP got up and asked about flags. It's not just Kemi. It should have been organised. There is this thing called WhatsApp. It should have been organised among the Tory backbenchers that whatever question you're down to ask today, make sure you get a dig in about Angela Rayner.

8:14Call her three homes Rayner as a minimum. Anything like that. Yeah, and the consequence, you could see it in the face of the front bench that they couldn't believe their luck. And you could tell in the responses of Labour MPs that they felt you have fumbled this. Now, it could be that none of this matters and she has to go because she has to go because what she did was wrong. But it could also be that sometimes in the history of Parliament, the mood of the chamber matters, that an incumbent party realises its own strength. and this could be one of those moments that if at this hour the Tories were incapable of really delivering a blow, well, maybe Angela could survive this.

8:53Yes, so nothing has changed because Labour's main strength remains the Conservatives' weakness. It's how they won the election and it's how they're able to go from crisis to crisis without anyone so far having to resign. Yes. And now we're questioning whether Kemi Badenow can go the distance, not a deputy prime minister who has admitted that she didn't pay enough tax. So we need to discuss whether we think she should go according to the evidence that's been presented to us. And let's be honest, let's just blow the Telegraph trumpet. Yes, this is our story. So it was our reporters that initially revealed after it was reported that she had bought this£800 ,000 seaside property in Hove on the seaside near Brighton, that she should have paid£70 ,000 in stamp duty, but ended up only paying£30 ,000.

9:44So then there was a question mark over the remaining£40 ,000. That was alongside a number of other unanswered questions, including which was her main primary residence. She had told the authorities in Greater Manchester, where she has a constituency home in Ashton under Lyme, that that was her main home. We subsequently found out that she sold her share in that to her ex-husband. They're now divorced. But the two children remain there. It then begs the question of why she ever suggested post that moment that it was her primary home when she didn't have a stake in it and didn't live there. Then we found out that she had also called Hove her primary home.

10:24Let's not forget that she's called Three Homes Rainer because she's got a grace and favour place at Admiralty House in London. then there was also suggestions that she was registered to vote in both Ashton and Hove again that doesn't seem quite right and she's basically said look I did what I did and I conducted this purchase of my second home in accordance with my accountant's advice but I now realise that that was wrong. Yes and also that the context for all this decision making is that her child is disabled and that she shares responsibility for the child's care at the home in Ashton that's split between her and her ex-husband.

11:09So while he is there, he is living there caring for the son, while she is there, she is living there caring for the son. Okay, but there are two things that still stand out about this, which to most people won't be are to get their head around. One is the fact that someone who is a constituency MP in one part of the country, who spends much of their time living in London in a Grace and Flavour flat, then buys a flat which they describe as their primary residence on the south coast. Yes, no constituents there. There is no call for her to be there at all. Some people speculated she was planning at some point in the future to jump to that constituency.

11:54Oh, a chicken run. A chicken run because of the rise of reform and maybe Gaza independent type stuff in her own constituency. So that was one possibility. But I think this is the first thing that most people would stumble upon is in most of our lives, right, you don't make decisions like that. And whenever you suddenly gain power and money and you start making decisions like that, you have to explain this. And this comes to my second point, which is the point about not paying the money. you only manage to not pay the money if you go out of your way to not pay the money by saying that's my primary residence.

12:30Yes. Or by entering into quite complex negotiations with accountants and lawyers that we would frankly associate with, as Angela Rayner would describe them, Tory scum. This is a kind of Bullingdon boy thing, isn't it? This is my point. In most of our lives, I don't know about you, I'm not very good with money. I don't have an accountant. I don't have an advisor. I probably pay more than I need to throughout much of my life because I don't do those things, because I just do what I honestly do and then pay the money that I'm asked to pay for it. You have to be a certain kind of person with a certain mentality and a certain amount of money to have the advisors that would tell you how to get around these things.

13:08Yes. And at what point do you have all of that and you cease being a democratic socialist? But what she's admitted to doing is having avoided paying 40 grand in stamp duty. And in admitting that she has avoided it and she's keen to pay it and referring herself to Laurie Magnus, who is the man that investigates ministerial misdeeds. Yeah. She's admitting that she did try to avoid tax, right? Yeah, of course. And I would add that in the case of Laurie Magnus, Labour argued while they were in opposition that he should have the power to tell prime ministers who can and cannot stay in office if they break the ministerial code.

13:52So that's one thing to park and to consider. What if he says she actually did break the ministerial code? Is Labour minded then to follow that advice or will Labour go back on what it previously said? and say, no, it's ultimately the prime minister's decision who stays or who goes. Also, the standard to which we hold a deputy prime minister and the minister in charge of housing. Deputy prime minister is a joke, doesn't it? I know. It's not a constitution. I know, I'm just saying that's the one that least matters. OK. You could have, like George Brown was deputy prime minister, a famous alcoholic.

14:28You know, it doesn't... All right, fair enough. It's the housing minister. It's the housing element. But I still don't think that ignorance can be a defence when you're in high office. But how can you be ignorant of such things when you're the housing minister? If you don't realise that you're accidentally avoiding taxes on a house purchase when you're the minister in charge of housing, that implies you're not super on top of your brief. Also, if you're not aware of the optics, the optics are bad for Labour in the sense that Donogate was bad. You know, we can, if we like, get people like Lord Ali to buy our suits and spectacles.

15:05We can, if we like, get Arsenal to always put us up in lavish corporate hospitality. Then we can reflect on how that looks to be on the left, to be a prime minister or a deputy prime minister of the people. And then we can probably safely conclude it's not a good look and that we shouldn't do it. there's that but in the case of Raina there's an extra layer because she is meant to be the sort of original non-politician politician yeah she's meant to be the woman who left school with no qualifications who was a single mom who was like the rest of us yeah and the rest of us don't as as you say, enter into complex deals and do trusts and try and take names off deeds ahead of buying new homes and all that stuff.

15:57And we don't... The other thing is she put herself on that old Labour, you know, honest gov-type platform when she repeatedly said things like this. One rule for them, another rule for us. And when she repeatedly attacked the Tories for any sense of dishonesty or wrongdoing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I wouldn't normally necessarily judge someone for doing this. Hey, I have an ISA. I'm clearly not that bad at financial management. There's nothing wrong with having an ISA. No, I know. But the problem with Labour and her ilk is that they like to imply there's an almost religious level of immorality to trying to keep your own money, and then she's caught doing this.

16:39You said it a few weeks ago. My mind instantly goes to Diane Abbott and schooling. And all the problems that new Labour people had with, oh, I'm going to send my child to a private school. I'm going to send my child to a grammar school because the local schools are not that good. Yes. Yeah, well, they're schools you created. I'm going to make it so difficult for you to privately educate your child. Yes. And it's interesting, isn't it, the rhetoric from the likes of Bridget Phillips and the Education Secretary, who was trying to be sisterly at the weekend by arguing in a quite capitalist way, actually, that Angela Rayne is free to spend her money on what she likes.

17:09But it still begs questions as to how an MP who doesn't earn that much money, I know the Deputy Prime Minister tag does get her a little bit higher up the pay scale, has got the money to buy. I can't afford to live in Hove. I could not afford to live in Hove. It's nearly a million pounds worth of property on the seafront. It's a very pricey area. And she's just gone through a divorce. And anyone that's just gone through a divorce will tell you it's a costly business. You're halving everything with someone effectively. What about the domestic issues? I must admit, I do feel sympathy for her on account of her desire to protect her son's privacy.

17:49Absolutely. I agree with that. And we should add that she asked for the injunction to be lifted so that we could have all the facts and understand what was going on. So to explain that, the domestic arrangements were covered by a post-divorce court order, which is very common in family courts in order to protect the children involved in any ongoing proceedings. It's certainly not right for journalists like us, let alone the general public, to know the nitty gritty of her divorce proceedings and how the children... And she has made it a public matter, not us. That's why we're discussing it. True.

18:22So she then said the injunction needs to be lifted because we need to have some transparency. and to be fair to her, I think she realised that she was looking guilty by her silence, that she couldn't explain a lot of this. The interview itself, I mean, it was quite tearful. She cuts a sympathetic figure. Yes. Is she being cut some slack because she is quite likeable? Yeah, I think very probably, yes. Had she been one of those ministers who we've never particularly liked, then it would be a problem. I mean, I think had Reeves been going through this or Bridget Phillipson, there'd be far less sympathy.

18:57Yes, because she's not cold, is she? She's quite a warm person. No. You could imagine going, we talked about Emily Thornberry the other day. You know, these are women in labour that even you and I, Tim, could probably go for a pint with. Yes. And get along quite well. Oh, she could drink us under the table. Indeed. Thornberry or Rayna? There is something about Angela's verbal excesses, which I find quite attractive. It's a bit like John Prescott. You know, John Prescott famously just made no sense at all. Yes, and made words up and things. But therefore, it sounds authentic. Even though he was always dissembling in everything he said, he was dissembling authentically because it wasn't sort of cut glass and precise.

19:38And who would push her out anyway? As you say, the opposition aren't doing a good enough job of putting her under the pressure that she needs to be under in order to have to resign. Yeah. OK, the media is going to be all over this all night tomorrow and probably until the weekend. end and then you're going to have the Sunday papers no doubt uncovering more about this sorry saga the problem is the budget the problem is is that all summer we've been talking about where are they going to raid and it's been on inheritance tax property purchases etc yes and so anything they do now is either going to be a joke because they'll say but one of your ministers tried to get away with it or they'll drop that policy and they'll say are you dropping that because one of your ministers did that.

20:18Yes. That's the problem. How does she sit on that front bench? It's now been announced that it's going to be November the 26th. The Chancellor, who is on a sticky wicket, has left it till as late as possible to have this budget that she doesn't really even want to have, having been undermined by the Prime Minister and others in the week. How does Angela Rayner sit there nodding along, jeering at the opposition with any credibility at all? I mean, is it... Is this... I'm now thinking, Tim, OK, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. This is now like she has now become a symbol of this government's terminal decline.

20:56I mean, I just don't think she can ever escape this now. As part of his mini reshuffle, Keir Starmer not only stole the Treasury Minister, Darren Jones, he also brought in Manoush Shafiq, an economist, suggesting that Number 10 wants greater control over fiscal policy. And if you look at Shafiq's past comments, it implies that it's going to be about fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget and spending is back on the table. So it's now not just the Treasury pressuring people to cut spending. It is number 10. So if the direction of this government is going to be reduced spending and higher taxes, how does it look to have as your deputy prime minister someone who's attempted to avoid tax?

21:44Yes. I think that's the fundamental problem. And we've got 12 weeks to this budget, which would be about the time that Magnus might carry out an investigation and then announce his findings. So the timing of a conference, again, how is the Labour Party conference going to look with her on stage? I mean, we're being relatively hostile, but actually slightly Miriam Cates-ish in our sympathy for her as a person. I wouldn't imagine some of the hard lefties who are going to Liverpool next month are going to be quite so sympathetic. They don't like this kind of behaviour, Tim. They don't. It's difficult because there is also the dimension to the party, particularly trade union working class, which does see her as a rare ordinary person in a government that they think is pretty square and dull.

22:31So there could be a lot of sympathy for her there. The ideologues who just think taxes are great are kind of middle class prudes anyway. I'm not sure they ever particularly liked Angela. It's probably worth noting, Tim, that the Telegraph response to whether Angela Rayner should stay or go is pretty unequivocal. A poll of 40 ,000 people has found that 93 % think that she should resign, just 7 % think that she should stay in post. Do we also fear for Kebby now at her own party conference? I do, yes. I don't think she's had a visible summer. It's not been a summer in which she has impressed herself upon the party.

23:09Rob Jenrick has dominated the headlines. She's going into this conference season. And although she denies that there is a plot, we all know that there is at least talk of a plot. We've all had dates whispered and things like that. I'm not saying there is definitely something in the works. It's more that she enters this conference with a significant part of the party really disillusioned with her and at least thinking about a plot. And she enters the conference under huge pressure to perform. Yes, it's going to be a really... I think this conference season, stay tuned. It's actually going to be really, really exciting.

23:45And speaking of that, we are going to be at the Reform Conference in Birmingham on Friday. We're going to do a on-the-spot episode, speaking to anyone we can, including Richard Tice, hopefully Farage, taking in Farage's speech, certainly. Just back from America. Just back from the US of A. This is reform at its peak, 35 % in the polls. After that, you're going to have Labour one year in, depressed, trying to keep Angela Rayner or dealing with her loss, whatever's happened by then. And then the Tories deciding whether or not Kemi should stay or go. In the past, conferences did not matter. This is a rare year in which conference is actually the place to be.

24:21The Daily Tea will be there every step of the way.

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25:09Before we go, shall we just discuss the feedback to our Is the Countryside Racist episode? Because quite a lot of you did think that the debate between Wilfred and Corin, Corin, the white academic claiming the countryside was racist, and Wilfred, the black farmer claiming that it wasn't, did sort of turn debate on its head, I thought, which was great. And we had lots of responses. Let me read out the first one. Dee Marwaha. I hope I've got that pronunciation right. I'm British, but from East African Indian descent, and I've lived in the countryside for 13 years. When I first moved to the South Downs, I did experience people doing a double take, sure.

25:49But when we spoke, people were lovely. As your farmer guest suggested, once people know you're local, there's never a problem. She reports having been the victim of racism in the aftermath of 9-11 when somebody called out terrorist from a van. But then she concludes, the report assumes that rural areas need to change to accommodate people of different ethnicities. No, she says in capitals. That's what makes the countryside so special. It's its own subculture which should be nurtured, not forced to change. Dave Fowler, who is keen to stress that he has no relation to yesterday's guest, the report's co-author Corin Fowler, said, I cannot help thinking you let Corin off the hook.

26:30What listeners might have been told purely for perspective is, one, she is the author of Green Unpleasant Land, Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections. Two, that this was followed by Our Island Stories, Country Walks Through Colonial Britain. And three, she also co-authored the National Trust's infamous Colonialism and Slavery Report, which alienated a significant percentage of its membership with its painfully one-sided wokery. Far from being an unbiased voice on the British countryside, Dave Fowler writes, an objective researcher who supposedly lets the data speak for itself, Fowler has an academic lifetime's form as an ideologue, a cliched postmodernist who, according to the Manchester Review, quote, unearths the hidden legacies of slavery, capitalism and exploitation that make up contemporary British relationships with the countryside, end quote.

27:22Clodagh Law says, I listened with utter amazement at the interview with Corin Fowler. Firstly, this is Britain, not Pakistan. Can you imagine going to Pakistan and demanding non-halal meat in the countryside there? This is the problem with multiculturalism. The ethnic minorities so described in this report expect the countryside to bend to them rather than the other way round. That said, I have lived in the countryside all my married life and never found any racism here. In fact, quite the contrary. And a final one. And Sarah Slim caught our eye with the title of her email that was, quote, the psychological burden of listening to Corinne Fowler for 24 minutes, 19 seconds.

28:01Not that she was counting. She concludes, for the sake of our fragile nerves, spare us these government commission numpties cluttering up what ought to be our sacred echo chamber. I say I thought Corinne Fowler was a lovely lady. I feel I need to say that for balance. I know. She's probably somewhere in a field self-flagellating over Britain's colonial past as we speak. Green, Unpleasant Land, Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections. If anyone is having any problems with insomnia, we suggest that you pick up that report later tonight. And we will be back tomorrow, 5pm.

28:51Thank you.