Whatever your views are on Rayner and her tax affairs, it’s clear she’s long been a target of media animus, not just for her politics, but for who she is.
Angela Rayner’s resignation as deputy prime minister and housing secretary marks the end of one of the most aggressive smear campaigns in recent political memory.
Within an hour of her announcement, the Telegraph was already claiming credit, emailing readers with the triumphant headline: “How the Telegraph led to Rayner’s downfall.”
It has the hallmarks of the Sun’s infamous ‘It’s the Sun wot won it’ headline, when it claimed credit for the surprise victory of the Conservatives and John Major in 1992.
The Telegraph bragged that Rayner “quit days after the Telegraph revealed she had failed to pay a £40,000 tax bill on the purchase of her seaside home.”
The investigation by Sir Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s own ethics adviser, concluded that Rayner had acted with integrity, but she had breached the ministerial code by relying on incomplete legal advice.
In other words, it wasn’t the Telegraph, but an internal standards process that triggered her resignation.
But that didn’t stop the newspaper from dancing on the political grave it helped dig.
Whatever your views are on Rayner and her tax affairs, it’s clear she’s long been a target of media animus, not just for her politics, but for who she is. A working-class woman from a Stockport council estate, who left school at 16 whilst pregnant and rose to one of the highest offices in government. For some, that isn’t inspirational, it’s threatening.
Consider the Mail’s recent front page of a photo of her in a rubber kayak, vaping, accompanied by the caption, “What this photo says about the smug, tin-eared socialist clique driving Britain into the ground.”
Courtesy of Mail columnist Sarah Vine, the article went further, accusing Rayner of “swanning around on the beach… knocking back a birdbath of wine” and owning three homes.
But facts are inconvenient for the right-wing tabloid media. The ‘three homes’ dig included a standard ministerial flat at Admiralty Arch, which comes with the job. A Reform MP wouldn’t be offered it because they’re not in government. And, if Nigel Farage or Richard Tice had access to the same property, would the Mail be calling them hypocrites? Unlikely.
The hypocrisy didn’t end there. Sarah Vine, who called Rayner a “freeloading hypocrite,” was herself caught up in controversy when her then-husband, Michael Gove, reportedly used MPs’ expenses to furnish a London flat before flipping his second-home designation to a new house in Surrey, claiming £13,000 in moving costs.
You’d think Sarah Vine would be keeping her head down, quietly hoping the Rayner homes row would blow over, given her own entanglement in a property-related scandal, not leading the charge to inflame it.
Meanwhile, right-wing commentators accuse Rayner of being “absent” from her Ashton constituency, while turning a blind eye to Nigel Farage who, just this week, the first week back in Parliament, jetted off to a far-right conference in the US. Not a whisper of outrage. No “Where’s Nige?” headlines. In fact, the Mail praised him on the very same front page that lambasted Rayner, hailing him as “finally, a politician who gets it.”
This is the same press that once sold Liz Truss as the second coming of Thatcher.
And we all know how that turned out.
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