Angela Rayner resigns – Today in Focus Extra

0:01This afternoon, the fall of Angela Rayner.

0:10It came at a moment when Angela Rayner's stock never seemed higher. The Deputy Prime Minister was well-liked on Labour's backbenches. It was her, after all, who had managed the government's climb-down on the welfare bill in June. And she was about to push through the biggest upgrade to workers' rights in a generation. A teenage mum who'd left school at 16. She stood out in Keir Starmer's cabinet as a rare personality and was openly discussed as a leader in waiting. Who else could have styled out those photos vaping on an inflatable kayak this summer or sipping a goblet of rosé while wearing a dry robe?

0:46Even right-wing news outlets were calling her iconic. But now, for Rainer, the fall. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rainer has resigned after... At noon today, she resigned after the Prime Minister's ethics advisor found that she'd breached the ministerial code by underpaying£40 ,000 of stamp duty on a flat in Hove, 260 miles from her Greater Manchester constituency. A landmark moment in the relatively early life of this government after a couple of weeks... So what now for Rayna, and for the government that's lost not just its deputy PM, but also its housing secretary? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd.

1:24Today in Focus Extra, why Angela Rayner had to go.

1:31Gabby Hinsliff, you're a Guardian columnist who has been following Angela Rayner's woes very closely of late. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us on, I think, a day that some people will consider a pretty sad day for the Labour Party. Yeah, I think there is an overwhelming feeling of sadness, actually. And in stock, why the tone of sadness, not just in Keir Starmer's letter accepting her resignation, because you kind of expect that. But actually also in Laurie Magnus' letter, the letter from the ethics watchdog, you know, in which he says that he uses the word unfortunate a lot, says she acted with integrity and with, you know, exemplary conduct to sort of commitment to public service.

2:06You know, you get the sense that this is not how anyone wanted it to end. Yeah. And Angela Rayner quit after a week of stories about her not paying enough stamp duty when she bought a new home in May this year on the south coast. and the ins and outs of it are a little bit complicated. So can you just unpack for us what happened? They are, yeah. So she bought a new flat in Hove in May, which was, you know, following on from, she divorced a couple of years ago. It's a new sort of move down to the South Coast where her partner, Sam Tarry, has roots. And she paid the standard rate of stamp duty on that transaction, which is basically what you pay if it's a very, you know, it's your only home and it's a straightforward transaction.

2:46and then sort of fast forward to this summer when kind of nobody really knew that she'd moved to Hove and literally it was a random Daily Mail reader with a camera phone who photographed her on the beach in a dry robe and it became a sort of ha-ha summer season story you know kind of from which people worked out that she was living in Hove and then people started sniffing around the purchase because of the back story as to this that you some readers may remember there was a fuss over whether or not she should have paid capital gains tax on the sale of her old council house years back. So Angela Rayner's tax arrangements have always been a subject of interest.

3:21People started poking around it. And then we got to, hang on a minute, there's still the family home up north. There's still, she has use of a government flat in Admiralty Arch. Are we sure this is her sole and primary, primary and only home? And this all came to a head. She'd insisted throughout that she'd paid the correct rate of stamp duty, but she commissioned specialist tax advice last week, which concluded that she should have paid the higher rate of stamp duty. So 40 grand more. And she was willing to pay that. That's not the issue. The issue is that you can't have a housing secretary who doesn't pay their property taxes in the run up to a budget that may be raising property taxes.

3:56So in some ways, it sounds quite straightforward. But part of the story is Raina's quite complex personal life, which she has fought quite hard in some ways to keep out of the media. But she outlined the circumstances in an exclusive letter to The Guardian on Wednesday. Can you just talk us through that? Yeah, that's where it all gets complicated because it comes down to the reason that she believed that this was her primary and only home and the reason that the tax man treats that differently. So she used to own, jointly own their family home in Ashlander Lyme with her husband Mark and that's where they lived with the kids.

4:31After they divorced, they put part of the sort of stake in the home into a trust for their middle son Charlie who is profoundly disabled and that that trust was set up initially to administer a compensation payment made for him some years ago due to the sort of circumstances of his birth and his disabilities. So she put when they divorced she put her remaining 25 % stake into the house into that trust so she no longer owned the house that's why she believed that you You know, the only house she now owned was in Hove. But the wrinkle is that if the person who owns the trust, as it were, the beneficiary of the trust, is under 18, which of course her son was, and their parents are the guardian of that, then basically the parent is then considered to own that stake in the trust.

5:21So, you know, she doesn't outright own the house in Manchester, but she's considered to have a beneficiary interest in it. And that indicated that she should be paying, that she should be treating Hove as a second home. So it's incredibly complicated, but that is where we are and that's how the mistake got made. And I should say, you know, there's no indication in the investigation that it was anything other than an honest mistake. The trouble is that at the level she's at, honest mistake, you can't afford an honest mistake. Yeah. And it's probably worth saying at this point that there's not a suggestion is there that she has moved wholesale down to Hove, given that she's a Greater Manchester MP.

5:58she said in that letter to the Guardian didn't she that she and her husband were doing what she called nesting this idea that the children stay put in the family home and then she and Mark her ex were kind of swapping in and out whenever she was back in the constituency yeah so where you live is not relevant for or where you spend your time is not relevant for stamp duty where you own is relevant for stamp duty but that's what that also complicated matters you know she's spending quite a lot of time still back in Ashton and under Lyme obviously they chose this arrangement so as not to disrupt the children you know deal is you don't have upheaval in their lives and their house is adapted for her son's needs.

6:30So she's splitting her time between there, London for work and Hove. That became part of the newspaper stories in that she's registered for council tax and for lots of family and individual related staff in Manchester still. That's treated as her primary residence for some reasons and Hove is primary for stamp duty. So again, this became confusing. You felt all the time from when this story broke that she was holding something back. The answers that came back to questions from the press were quite stilted and quite careful. And she was obviously trying to avoid talking too much, going too much into the details of their family life and particularly the details around her son's medical history, their divorce, all these things are sensitive things.

7:09And she was trying to... And legally she couldn't. We should say that. Legally she couldn't reveal some of these details. Precisely, because there was a court order in place to protect the children's privacy and she had to apply to have that law returned in order to be able to come out with a full explanation of what had happened. Yeah. I mean, it's a dreadful cliche that a week is a long time in politics, but... About five minutes is a long time in politics at the moment. Yeah. And as recently as Wednesday, Keir Starmer was standing by her. So was Rachel Reeves. You had Ed Davey, leader of the Lib Dems, giving a really quite sympathetic statement.

7:41He said, you know, he of course is also the parent of a disabled child and that worry about his child's welfare is something that kind of kept him up at night and therefore he was sympathetic. But do you think that from that point on, the tide of public opinion started to turn against Angela Rayner? I'm not necessarily sure that it's that simple. I mean, I think there was two things. I think that the sort of Starmer standing by here is genuine. I don't think that was him thinking, well, I'll do it for the cameras on Wednesday and I'll shove her out the back door. You know, it was not that. I think her leaving, however difficult at times their relationship has been, her leaving causes him far more problems than in some ways, you know, her staying so I think there was a definite aim to to keep her I think in public terms it's difficult to say because she's completely she's she is not you know she's a marmite politician to use another cliche you either love Angela Rayna and nothing she could do would change your mind about that or you hate Angela Rayna and you can't wait to stick the boot in you know and I think so you see very very different sort of split opinions on her but I think what it comes down to in the end probably is a sense that it was never going to stop you know it wasn't going to stop yeah i don't know but kirsten will have probably seen the pictures that most of us have seen of the graffiti that had appeared in hove that said angela attacks evader reiner and bitch i was watching northwest tonight i live in the neighboring constituency actually to ashton's line where angela reiner is the mp and there were vox pops in ashton town center on thursday and okay maybe take vox pops with a pinch of salt but every everybody was kind of saying you know double standards what a hypocrite it really did feel like she'd lost public support yeah i think the sort of the overwhelming problem with public opinion is as i said that you can't you just you can't broadly speaking you can't be a government that puts up people's taxes and not pay your own taxes that is kind of that's basically what it comes down to it's not more complicated than that.

9:41And the whole of government ends up having to dance around, would have to end up dancing around, you know, whatever is going on in Angela Rayner's kind of financial life or whatever the story is in front of the Daily Telegraph today. And in the run-up to the budget, that's very difficult. That starts to interfere with the kind of general workings of government. And then today came the outcome of the investigation by the Prime Minister's Independent Advisor on Ministerial Standards, Sir Laurie Magnus. Rayner herself had referred herself to him just on Wednesday. What did he find? So he found that she had acted in good faith, that she paid, you know, she had paid the amount of stamp duty, you believe, that she thought she should pay.

10:24He said she acted with integrity and with a dedicated and exemplary commitment to public service. But, and it's a big but, he said that on examining all the sort of documentation that went back and forth between her and her solicitor. She was advised twice that she only needed to pay the standard rate of stamp duty, but that came with a caveat that she should seek special tax advice because of the complex arrangements surrounding their family. So that meant she'd breached the ministerial code. And at that point, then it is very much incumbent on Starber to act, although he still retained the choice if he had wished to do so.

10:58What do you make of her resignation letter? The way she has chosen to leave, which is to resign and say both you know I'm very sorry that I made a mistake but here's an enormous list of things that I did to government and reasons that I will be completely irreplaceable and reminders of why you thought I was great for so long and also to say you know that I'm leaving partly because of the pressure on my family life that does leave the door open potentially to her to come back in a way that hanging on till the bitter death and being forced out would not. Yeah, and it's probably worth emphasising that this story is moving very quickly.

11:34We're just hearing briefings now that Starmer has used Rayna's departure to carry out a reshuffle, which apparently will see Yvette Cooper move from Home Secretary to Foreign Secretary. Shabana Mahmood then takes her old job and is promoted from justice. And then, deep breath, apparently then David Lammy, who was Foreign Secretary, takes over at the Ministry of Justice but also becomes Deputy Prime Minister. What next for Starmer and his government do you think? I mean, Rayna wasn't just Deputy PM and Housing Minister. She was also Deputy Party Leader, of course. Government's lost a deputy prime minister and a department and also a deputy party leader and also something that's kind of harder to fill than all those things, which is a really big character who was capable of connecting emotionally with voters in a way that Starmer, if we're honest, doesn't.

12:28And someone who you could see going toe to toe with Nigel Farage and all the rest of it. And the trouble with trying to replace her is that there just isn't one person who is all those things in one. You know, you can think of, there are still plenty of working class voices left in cabinet. There are still plenty of senior women with leadership potential. There are still people who care about building more council houses and workers' rights and the causes that she championed. And because actually of the way she tended to run her department, which was she tended to delegate quite a lot, her junior ministers are capable and competent and all the rest of it.

13:04But you don't have the person who combines all those three things, all those things. And also on top of it is a kind of living proof. I mean, she said this in her resignation letter, and she says it often, that politics changes lives. She always says, you know, she would not be here given the way, you know, the sort of chaotic, dysfunctional childhood she had, being a teenage mama at 16 and all the rest of it, she would not be here today if it wasn't for the union that was essentially like her family to her and without Shawstart teaching her how to be a mom and without Gordon Brown's child tax credits, which helped her put food on the table, all the rest of it.

13:39She would not be here without policies enacted by Labour government, she always says. And she is the kind of exemplar to which Labour Party can always point and say, look, Labour government's used to being able to make a difference. She's kind of our talisman, our lodestar, our way of showing that that we can do that again. And there just isn't anyone who replaces that. But there is one position that Starmer can't fill simply by rearranging the deck chairs. He needs a new deputy Labour Party leader. And tradition dictates that the party members get to decide who that will be. They're going into party conference season with potentially a contest for the deputy leadership hanging over everyone.

14:18You know, the next few weeks are just going to be a beauty parade of candidates, assuming that's where we are going. There has been some speculation he could just do away with the whole deputy leader thing altogether. So I think you have this pending serious challenge, I think, to Keir Starmer's authority because who he will want, obviously, a deputy with whom he can work closely, a deputy who's on side. What if the party doesn't want that? What if the party sees this as an opportunity to bring a much more left-wing voice into the equation or someone who would challenge Starmer more frequently or even to treat it as a proxy for a leadership contest that may follow, you know, a sort of test of where the party membership is.

15:01So this would be quite an interesting test of backbench sentiment, party sentiment, where the sort of centre of gravity of the Labour Party is now. There's 101 headaches here that Keir Starmer really does not need. Indeed. Gabby, thank you very much. Thank you. That was Guardian columnist Gabby Hinsley for my thanks to her. you can follow all of the latest on this story on the Guardian politics live blog at theguardian.com. And that's all for today. This episode was produced by Alex Atak and was presented by me, Helen Pidd. The executive producer was Sammy Kent. We'll be back on Monday.

15:37This is The Guardian.