Angela Rayner has to resign. Set aside the obvious and understandable emotion. Ignore the desire – equally understandable – to protect her family.
She has broken the rules. She has, by her own admission, failed to pay the appropriate amount of tax. So now she has to go.
Not least because of the hypocrisy and lies. Yes, Rayner may have been prevented from speaking out on her own behalf because of a court order. But her allies and supporters were not gagged. And the line they peddled on her behalf was clear.
She had done nothing wrong, they claimed. Her tax affairs were entirely in order. The stories about her were all a smear peddled by her political rivals – internal and external – and in the press.
They were attacks motivated by spite and envy. They were attacks motivated by disgust at her working-class background, we were told.
And, most persistently, they charged that the attacks were motivated by sexism. Angela Rayner was being singled out for this malign abuse because she was a woman.
And every one of those statements was a lie.
The complaints against her were not only legitimate, but entirely accurate.
Angela Rayner has admitted to underpaying on her stamp duty
The Deputy Prime Minister next to Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs after she admitted to the tax error and revealed she considered resigning
The Deputy Prime Minister – who had been elevated to her role thanks in no small part to her vicious attacks on Tory greed and tax dodging – has, deliberately or otherwise, short-changed the already cash-strapped Exchequer.
The criticisms levelled at her by her political adversaries and the Press have proven not to be smears – either sexist or class based – but the truth. And over the past week Rayner’s ‘allies’ have tried to withhold the truth from the British public.
We have yet to see the full scale of the financial irregularity that has occurred. Yet this we already know. Rayner’s hypocrisy is off the scale.
She claims to have been trying to protect her family from excessive scrutiny. But she had no such qualms when she led the charge against Rishi Sunak’s wife’s tax arrangements.
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She has said her return was submitted in error and pleaded that in mitigation. But she drew no such distinction when lambasting Tory ministers, such as Jeremy Hunt, who were found to have made errors in their tax affairs.
Her failure to declare and pay the proper amount of tax would be politically damning at the best of times. But she has done so at precisely the time her own Government is preparing to break its pledge to the people and business leaders of Britain not to further raise their already intolerable tax burden.
And what’s more, she has done so in relation to property taxes, precisely at the time the Chancellor is said to be preparing to hammer ordinary homeowners. Indeed, Rayner has herself advocated hikes in tax on property.
But alongside the staggering hyprocrisy sits an equally staggering lapse in judgment. Rayner is asking people to believe she filed the returns relating to her properties in error. It was, she claims, an honest mistake.
But it is only a couple of years since she was embroiled in a different scandal over her tangled property and tax affairs. At that time she was cleared – though the full details of her arrangements were never fully explained.
How is it credible this has happened again? How can someone who apparently takes so little care over her own finances ask to be trusted to help oversee the nation’s finances?
Because Angela Rayner is not some obscure backbencher. She is in the midst of another scandal over her personal housing, but is the nation’s housing minister. She is also the nation’s deputy Prime Minister. She is tipped by a majority of Labour insiders to be the nation’s next Prime Minister.
That ambition is no longer credible. Angela Rayner sits damned not just be her own actions, but her own words, and her own hypocrisy.
She must go.
