Bums & Bites

Angela Rayner’s downfall wasn’t complicated. The question she should have asked herself when she bought that £800,000 flat in Hove was painfully simple: could this come back to bite me on the bum? Anyone in her position should have known the answer. Stamp duty isn’t an obscure corner of the tax code – it’s the one everybody moans about down the pub, the one you don’t get to fumble when you’re in charge of housing policy. It’s like a Health Secretary cutting the GP queue. The public won’t care about the technicalities; they’ll see hypocrisy, plain as day.

She says she was badly advised, and maybe she was. But politics isn’t about pointing at your solicitor and saying “it wasn’t me.” Politics is about judgement, and her failure to ask the obvious question has now cost her three jobs and, at least for the moment, her career. To the public, the detail doesn’t matter. All they see is a missing wedge of tax and a senior Labour politician caught with her trousers down.

Could she have clung on? In calmer times, perhaps. But these aren’t calmer times. Reform is climbing in the polls, feeding off every hint of establishment hypocrisy, and Labour cannot afford even the smallest chink in their armour. Starmer knew that if he dug in behind her, the story would bleed into every headline and Farage would dine out on it for months. Rayner had no real option but to go. Better to fall on her sword now than drag her leader down with her.

Is that the end of her? Not necessarily. Westminster has a shorter memory than it likes to admit, and Rayner still has her roots in the Labour membership. If she pays up, disappears to the back benches, and gets her head down in constituency work, she could one day re-emerge – perhaps even closer to a general election, when Labour might need her blunt authenticity on the stump. Redemption stories sell just as well as scandals, and the tabloids will happily run “Rayner’s Comeback” if it suits the moment. She might even use the very issue that brought her down as the foundation for a new crusade – fighting for fairer, simpler property tax so that nobody else gets caught in the same mess. It would be the most political of reinventions: turning a blunder into a banner.

But if she’s to have that chance, she’ll have to keep that one question close at hand. Will this come back and bite me on the bum? She forgot it once. Forget it again, and she’s finished.

And what of Keir Starmer? He may not have swung the axe himself, but he’s bleeding all the same. When your deputy resigns over ethics, the splatter doesn’t stay confined. It lands on the leader too, raising questions about his judgement, his authority, and his ability to keep the ship steady. Worse, he now faces the headache of filling the vacuum. The names already swirl – Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, Yvette Cooper, Darren Jones – each carrying their own factional baggage. Whoever steps in won’t just replace Rayner, they’ll tilt the balance inside Labour, and perhaps reshape how Starmer himself is judged.

So Rayner may yet find a way back. Starmer may patch over the hole. But for now, one thing is clear: in a political climate where Reform are climbing and Labour can’t afford even a hairline crack, one misjudgement doesn’t just bite you on the bum – it takes a chunk out of your leader too.