The hounding of Angela Rayner is an outrageous declaration of class war

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, is a remarkable product of British social mobility, the beneficiary of not one but two signature policies: Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy, and Tony Blair’s Sure Start. She is on the threshold of high cabinet office, having overcome a difficult start in life.

She left school, pregnant, at 16. She learned to care for her son partly thanks to Sure Start, the early years support programme set up by Labour in 1998, got a job as a care worker, bought her council flat and built a blended family while rising as a trade union official to become an MP.

On entering parliament in 2015, she rose through the opposition ranks with dizzying speed, through a combination of luck and evident ability. When Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader cleared out shadow ministers, she became shadow education secretary in 2016. It was a huge promotion, which she handled with fearless skill, deploying her educational background to tilt policy away from the traditional focus on A-levels and graduates.

She secured the deputy leadership in 2020, then fought off Keir Starmer’s attempt to sideline her, securing the significant employment rights brief and the promise that she will be deputy prime minister in a Labour government.

Throughout her brief political career, she has been the victim of the last acceptable prejudice in public life: the bias against people who are evidently working class. When focus groups carried out by the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership were shown TV clips of her, she went down badly and was dismissed as “stupid”. She has fought back among the voters, and is now relatively well known and well regarded, although she divides opinion sharply.

Conservatives and the Conservative press, for example, see her as a potentially unpopular figure who can be used to drag Labour down. But there is something that doesn’t feel right about the current onslaught against her.

The latest attack started when researchers working on a book about her by Michael Ashcroft, the former Tory peer (he is both a former Tory and a former peer, having left the House of Lords in 2015), discovered that she had sold her ex-council house shortly before becoming an MP but had paid no capital gains tax on it, despite living in her husband’s house at the time.

It is a bit rich that Ashcroft, who promised to give up his non-dom status when William Hague nominated him for a peerage, but who appears to have maintained his domicile in Belize ever since, should criticise someone else’s tax arrangements. And it is absurd to suggest that there is an equivalence between someone such as Rayner not realising that she might have been liable for possibly £1,500 in tax, and Nadhim Zahawi, who paid an estimated £4.8m tax bill while he was chancellor, including a penalty.

Of course, Rayner should explain in more detail why she was not liable for tax on the sale of her house. It may be, for example, that, having nominated her house as her primary residence, as she was entitled to do, her former husband was liable for tax on the sale of his house – as a married couple may nominate only one. (Perhaps the Tories should focus instead on this unintended disincentive to marriage in the tax system.)

However, the recent prominence given to the story by the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday suggests that there are other motives involved beyond simply clarifying the complicated finances of a leading politician’s family. Funny how, when the finances of a southern, middle-class male prime minister went awry over wallpaper and other matters, it was all deemed irrelevant!

I can’t help feeling that there is something about Rayner that causes Tory HQ and the Conservative press to lose all sense of proportion. Maybe she is simply one of those vivid characters who are more newsworthy whatever they do.

She is no saint. One of the reasons Tories might not like her is that she called them “scum”, although she apologised for it and promised to learn from her mistake. And she has defiantly refused to publish the tax and legal advice she says she has received, which contrasts with her many demands that Tories facing questions about their financial affairs should publish everything.

She will have to come clean eventually because this is the sort of story that could catch fire in an election campaign, however unfair it may seem to her. But I do think that the Tories and the Conservative press should dial down the outrage somewhat. It is unseemly. Worse than that, it is so over the top, it could be counterproductive and, irony of ironies, persuade undecided voters to take the side of the underdog who achieved what in the US would be called the American Dream: an upwardly mobile success story, someone who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.