What Angela Rayner’s seafront pad reveals about today’s luvvie Labour

Angela Rayner’s living arrangements are back in the spotlight. Last year, the press and her opponents raised questions about the sale of her former council house in Manchester. This time around, they are questioning the amount of stamp duty the UK deputy prime minister paid when recently acquiring an £800,000 apartment in Hove, near Brighton in East Sussex.

We all enjoy a late-summer scandal, especially one that involves pictures of grand seafront residences juxtaposed with images of the deputy PM vaping away in an inflatable canoe, or chugging wine on the beach. Yet the financial ins and outs of Rayner’s house-hunting seem to reveal little more than the fact she has a fantastic accountant.

Rayner is Labour’s least-objectionable minister. Compared to the nasal disdain emitted by Starmer, or the helmet-haired prissiness of Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillipson, Rayner has a personality and an appetite for fun that the rest of Labour’s front bench lack. She pops up all over the place: smoking, drinking, swearing, flirting, raving and often rocking a great pair of shoes. Okay, so these skills might not top the list of traditional attributes required of a politician. But the fact that Rayner has maintained a degree of authenticity, while ruthlessly climbing up Labour’s hierarchy, is surely a testament to her strength of character.

Rayner left school without any qualifications and gave birth to her first child at the age of just 16. She has gone from being a care worker to deputy prime minister, moving, in the process, from a council estate in Stockport to a grace-and-favour apartment in Whitehall’s Admiralty House. For a working-class teenage mum to become part of the establishment in this way requires a bucketload of hard work and chutzpah.

Yet Rayner ends up being criticised by everyone. There’s more than a whiff of snobbery in the coverage of the second-home scandal – an implication that she has ‘ideas above her station’. At the same time, Rayner falls foul of the left’s own politics of envy, which suggests no one should aspire to a second home or, for that matter, foreign holidays or a private education for their kids. With 7.9million people in the UK currently receiving out-of-work benefits, we need more ambition and hard work, not less. We should celebrate successful people, not knock them down.

Nevertheless, Rayner can be fairly accused of hypocrisy. After all, it’s her government that has gone furthest in taxing wealth and thwarting ambition. Rayner has also been quick to shout about other people’s financial affairs, most notably those of ex-PM Rishi Sunak’s wife.

Rayner stands accused of removing her name from the deeds of her house in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency so she could avoid second-home taxes when purchasing her Hove flat. Yet for council-tax purposes, she has continued to list her constituency house as her primary residence, allowing her to avoid council tax on the London apartment. While these shenanigans may be hypocritical when everyone else in the country is being asked to accept financial immiseration, they are not illegal.

Rayner is far from the first politician to get caught out like this. The infamous 2009 expenses scandal revealed that one MP used taxpayers’ money to clean his moat, while another used it to repair his floating duck house. And anyone old enough to remember John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ moral crusade, conducted against a backdrop of Tory MPs being exposed for having extra-marital affairs, would know politics is rife with hypocrisy.

Yet the allegations surrounding Rayner keep on coming. The latest is that her move to the East Sussex coast represents a ‘chicken run’ – an attempt to safeguard her political career by moving to the safer seat of Hove and Portslade, fearful that Reform might surge to victory in Ashton-under-Lyne at the next election. If true, it would imply she’s plotting to both oust the incumbent Labour MP, Peter Kyle, and convince a whole new constituency to back her.

Rayner’s personal journey upwards financially and southwards geographically is revealing in this sense. First, it captures the Labour Party’s own transformation over recent decades. This is a party that has lost touch with working-class voters and become a party of the cultural elite, concentrated in and around London and Britain’s major cities. Second, it hints at Labour’s future, too – that its best electoral prospects are no longer in Greater Manchester but in uber-woke enclaves like Brighton and Hove.

Rayner’s move is a harbinger of Labour’s future irrelevance.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/