Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner admits underpaying stamp duty

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, Shuti Gatwa returns in a seductively clever play, Born With Teeth, from the Royal Shakespeare Company at London's Wyndham Theatre. Born With Teeth imagines what happens when two of the greatest writers of all time got together in a writer's room to write a trilogy together, and those writers happened to be Shakespeare and Marlowe. We're delighted that we have two incredibly charismatic actors, Shuti Gatwa and Edward Blumel, as our Marlowe and our Shakespeare, and we're really enjoying exploring the Elizabethan world that these two writers had to navigate.

0:58But first. Today, Sir Keir Starmer faced the first PMQs after the summer recess, But the big story of the day is Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner disclosing that she did not pay enough stamp duty tax on her second home. She has referred herself for investigation, and HMRC has been contacted to rectify the issue. She's blamed incorrect legal advice for the error. In other news, this year's autumn budget will be held on 26th November, which is nearly a month later than last year's budget was held. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is under huge pressure amid rapidly rising borrowing costs and an apparent black hole in the public finances and admitted that the economy is not working well enough.

1:41Joining us now is The Standard's chief political correspondent, Rachel Burford. So Rachel, tell me more about this news that broke just before PMQs today. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, came out and admitted that she had not paid enough tax when she bought her new£800 ,000 flat in Hove. This is a bit of a story that's been rumbling on for days. accusations that she dodged stamp duty amounting to about£40 ,000. She previously said there was no wrongdoing at all, but she's now come out and admitted that actually she was given incorrect legal advice is what she said, and that she's now referred herself to the Independent Advisor on Ministerial Standards who will investigate.

2:18And HMRC have been contacted as well to rectify the issue and ensure that she does actually pay that money that she owed. There's been huge speculation about this over the last few days, ever since it was reported that she'd paid a lot less stamp duty than anyone else buying a flat of that price would have done. She has explained it from her point of view. It's sort of quite complicated, but essentially, yesterday, number 10 was saying that there was a court order in place, which meant she couldn't explain herself. That has now been overturned. And she said her son, who is disabled, received a financial award in 2020 and that money was placed into a trust.

2:53And when she and her now ex-husband, who she divorced in 2023, some of the interest in the home they owned in her Ashton underlying constituency was transferred to that trust. At the beginning of this year, she sold her remaining stake in that family home, which she said was her life savings. She sold that to her son's trust in January and then she used that cash to put down the deposit for the new flat near Brighton. She says that based on advice from lawyers, she paid stamp duty on that flat that she thought that she owed. However, now she's had more legal advice after all the reports came out that she should have paid a lot more and has been advised that she did underpay and because of the way the trust was set up, she should have paid a lot more.

3:36It is sort of all quite complicated, but essentially, yes, she's admitted that she should have paid a lot more and that, she says, is not necessarily her fault, but she's rectifying that now. There's a lot of Labour MPs that are quite annoyed about this. It does look very bad when people are struggling. There is a cost of living crisis in this country. Stamp duty is a controversial tax already. You're essentially taxing people for buying a home. And it looks very bad when Angela Rayner, who is also the housing secretary, appears to have dodged this payment. I think her words were, it's really devastating for me.

4:08I thought I'd done everything properly and I relied on the advice that I received. And I'm devastated because I've always upheld the rules and always have done and always felt proud to do that. So she's saying this isn't her fault. She received bad advice and it's being rectified now. It does look very bad for the government. And, you know, what people are going to see in those headlines is housing secretary dodges tax and admits that. And do you think Raina is being judged too harshly? Or is this treatment deserving of someone who holds high public office? I think when you are holding a position that she is holding, you do have to be absolutely transparent about your affairs, particularly your tax affairs.

4:46And I think if it was reversed, if we were still under a Tory government, and it was Boris Johnson being accused of dodging stamp duty, I don't think she would have had the same sort of sympathy for him, perhaps that she's asking people to have for her now. Obviously, she has got quite a complicated family life. She's talked about her son who's got disabilities and she had this sort of quite complicated trust set up for him to provide for him in the future. That is where this mistake, as she's saying, has stemmed from. Ultimately, she has not paid tens of thousands of pounds worth of tax that she should have done.

5:20And it is only being rectified because of multiple newspaper reports and pressure put on her over the last few days. leader of the Conservative Party did bring it up. And she said, you know, if the Prime Minister had a backbone, he would sack Angela Rayner for this. But Kirstama really defended his deputy. He said she's explained her personal circumstances in detail. She's gone over and above in setting out the details, including asking a court to lift a confidentiality order relating to her own son. He said he's spoken at length to the Deputy Prime Minister, and he knows how difficult that decision was for her and her family.

5:53And she did it to ensure that all the information is in the public domain. And she's now referred herself to the Independent Advisor on Ethics. That's the right thing to do. He said he's very proud to sit alongside Hunter Lerner. So he has really defended her despite, you know, massive scrutiny I think she's going to face in the coming days. The other big story from today regards Chancellor Rachel Reeves' budget. What can you tell us about that? So November 26th is going to be the budget, which I think is the last day of the year where you could actually consider it an autumn budget. She is facing a lot of pressure at the moment.

6:23There is an up to£41 billion black hole in the public finances. People are feeling the pressure when it comes to the cost of living already. And there has been a lot of speculation about where Rachel Rees is going to get that money from that she needs to fund public finances. And that is ultimately going to have to result in tax rises. Now, where they're going to be, we don't know exactly. There's been a lot of talk about more property tax increases. The Prime Minister, there's been speculation this morning that he's going to seek to drive through reforms to the welfare state. I think you may remember that earlier this year, they tried to do the sort of same thing, but they were fiercely opposed by Labour backbenchers.

7:03We're looking at this sort of financial black hole in the public finances. And in 2024, 2025, the UK spent over£303 billion on welfare. That is a figure that ministers are now saying is unsustainable. We've got 6.5 million people, a record number, claiming jobless benefits. It's going to have to be some work to try and get more people back into work and ultimately paying tax to help boost the Treasury's coffers. Finally, is there anything else you want to add? Some of the Tory MPs coming out of PMQs were a bit disappointed in Kemi Bandnok's performance there. She had a lot of ammunition. She didn't really make a big dent.

7:41I think a lot of Tory MPs have come out of PMQs feeling a bit let down by their leader's performance. Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, an Elizabethan battle of two literary titans awaits in a historically fictitious play that blends intrigue and eroticism. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

8:10Welcome back. There's a new play on show in the capital from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Born with Teeth explores the relationship between two famous playwrights, Kit Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and it's been described as a jewel of wits, words and power play. The American writer Liz Duffy Adams imagines the pair collaborating on three parts of Henry VI, whilst religious and political tensions run high in Elizabethan England. The question is, in this cat and mouse game, whose will is strongest? Marlowe's star was very much shining very, very brightly at the time, and Shakespeare's star was rising.

8:48And that dynamic in the play is going to end up on top, but it's very much part of the journey of the play. Shakespeare and Marlowe have to collaborate together and yet we see their envy of each other their admiration for each other audiences can expect a real wrestling match it should be steamy at times there's also the battle of their wits but it's also partly just seeing these two incredible artists coming together to fight it out That was the director, two-time Olivier Award winner Daniel Evans speaking and joining us now is the standards theatre critic and host of the London Theatre Review podcast Nick Curtis Shuti Gatwa is a big name what is he best known for and what did you make of his performance in Born With Teeth?

9:34He's probably initially best known for Sex Education which was his sort of breakout role then of course became Doctor Who which he did for I think two seasons while Doctor Who was still running he also made his National Theatre debut as Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest last year which was another great breakthrough And in this play's Christopher Marlowe, the contemporary and, in his day, superior of Shakespeare. Marlowe was a lot more famous than Shakespeare earlier on in life, but he died young. Shakespeare ended up excelling him. This play imagines the two of them working together on the three parts of Henry VI, for which Shakespeare ends up taking sole credit.

10:10It sort of works perfectly because of where the two writers are at the stage of their career. As I say, Marlowe is far more famous, far more notorious than Shakespeare, who has come to writing later after being a jobbing actor. And what themes does this play explore? It's about Elizabethan politics. It's about how you go about writing. It's about fame and notoriety and living in a police state. But it is also about these two men. Marlowe, in particular, is always thought to have been gay. There are various quotes from him. There are clues in his plays. And there's a school of thought that suggests that Shakespeare was gay or at least bisexual, although we know he was also married with children.

10:44So it's about these two men in a room working on a play, but also the sort of attraction between them and also the attraction, possibly, of the secret life of espionage at a time when the Elizabethan court is sort of riven with spies and with informers. Tell me more about the play Henry VI. They're sort of the lesser known of Shakespeare's history plays. You have your sort of Henry IV, two parts of Henry IV. Here you have Henry V, you have Richard II, Richard III, which are all done much more often. I think I've only ever seen the Henry play, these later Henry plays, done once a long, long time ago.

11:17Again, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, who have mounted this production, Born with Teeth, in the West End. And they're about early Tudor politics, but probably very much about the sort of politics of the later Elizabethan time as well. Is Born with Teeth entirely fictitious, or is it embellished from real-life events? As with Shakespeare's plays, it's based in real events, but very loose with the facts. In fact, there's a very funny scene at the beginning. Kit Marlowe has a very rude line about what people can do to themselves if they complain about getting events in the wrong order. So we do know that the Elizabethan playwriting world, Jacobean playwriting world, was a fairly small one.

11:51Probably these people did all know one another. They did all write together and collaborate on scenes, or sort of knock off one another's writing. We do know that Marlowe was more famous in his time and more celebrated in his earlier life than Shakespeare was, even though they were pretty much exact contemporaries. And we do know that Marlowe died at age, I think, 29, certainly very young, in a tavern brawl in Deptford over what was called a quibble over a reckoning. Other people have suggested that it was a far more serious reckoning, that it was Marlow's possible actions as a spy that were coming home to haunt him, or that he was killed for his sexuality, or for his lack of faith.

12:23It's basically blasphemy. So did you learn anything new about these two literary icons? I was sort of aware of the growth of espionage and intrigue in the Elizabethan court. I'd never put that in the context of the cultural life of the time as well. These playwrights were being sponsored by noblemen, and these noblemen would have a political agenda of their own, or they'd be sort of playing off their rivals in court. So it is entirely likely that Marlowe and possibly Shakespeare were hired to sort of spy on rival nobles by their own patrons. One of the interesting things I think about the play is that it's constantly asking the question whether you should believe what's in front of you.

13:00You know, Shakespeare initially rebuffed Marlowe's advances, claiming that he's basically a heterosexual husband and father of two, but it very quickly becomes clear that is not the whole truth about Shakespeare. He also claims not to be a Catholic, but his family, he says he has members of his family who were Catholics. Of course, before the Reformation under Henry VIII, everybody was a Catholic, so this is not unlikely, but being a Catholic was a very dangerous thing under Elizabeth I. It's quite interesting the mood of sort of fear and pretense and dissembling that goes on. Everybody is sort of putting on a facade or a pose in order to get through life, really.

13:34And this is an erotic play as well, isn't it? It's really quite sexy. Even since he appeared in The Importance of Being Earnest, I feel Chutigatwa has grown in sort of charisma and stage presence, and he prowls this stage like a sort of lazy but very dangerous big cat. Shakespeare is more, Edward Blumel's will is much more sort of diffident and cautious, but their scenes together do have a definite erotic charge. Can you describe the staging and set? It's staged very simply. Basically, you first see them framed in some screens hanging Will by his wrists and Kit by his ankles, obviously being interrogated as to whether they are blasphemers or secret Catholics and things like that.

14:14Then the screens close and you see them both suffering as if they'd been tortured. And the screens open and Will starts forward and says, yeah, well, none of that actually happened. And the language is quite a mixture of sort of modern and archaic as well. The actual action of the play, apart from the commentary that happens at the front of the stage, All takes place around one long tavern table and a couple of chairs. They're hemmed in on three sides by these enormous banks of floor-to-ceiling bright lights, which are suggestive of the scrutiny they're under and the fact that in this state, everybody's actions are constantly being monitored.

14:45Is there anything else you want to add? It's kind of interesting that it's been done by the Royal Shakespeare Company, our leading classical theatre company, who have their own theatres in Stratford-on-Avon and who are regularly visiting London now on a more regular basis than they have done in recent years. but this has been launched straight into the West End with two very famous TV faces in it and I think that's quite an interesting sort of comment on the ecology of theatre. Shakespeare's plays were sold by the star actors of the time and now probably to launch a play in the West End with the RSC.

15:12You need people like Gaptar and Blumel to bring in that audience so it's a quite slight quite clever multi-layered sort of project. Finally one more question from me do you think there is still an appetite from modern audiences to watch Shakespeare's plays nowadays? I think It's always dangerous to bang on too much about the relevance of Shakespeare. There was a big booming ecology in the theatre. It's only because so much of Shakespeare survives, arguably that he has the dominance that he does, although you can also argue that he was a superior writer to anyone else with far greater vocabulary and far greater imagery and a far greater understanding of the human condition.

15:46Undoubtedly, there's still an appetite for his plays around. The RSC is bringing more work back into London in the future. What I'd like to see is actually more of his contemporaries' work done. There was a time about 20 years ago when you would regularly see plays by Thomas Kidd, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, who are mentioned in Born With Teeth as well. Shakespeare's Globe was partly founded to do the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and they seem to have, bar a couple of exceptions, sort of skimped a bit on the contemporaries, and I'd quite like to see a few more of those plays done for contrast.

16:17And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. We'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm. We'll see you then.