Labour is blinded by a misguided sense of moral superiority. The Rayner scandal proves it

The Government has proclaimed the former deputy leader a hero. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds

10 October 2025 Daily Telegraph

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The good people of the Labour Party are big fans of high taxes, until the taxman comes knocking on the doors of their grandees. And so, Angela Rayner may have had to leave the Government in disgrace over underpaid stamp duty, but to her colleagues she is a martyr.

Angela Rayner has adopted her ‘one rule for them, another rule for us’ refrain she regularly flung at the Tories

Last week at the Labour Party conference, MPs and delegates rallied around the former deputy prime minister to pay homage. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, led the tributes from the main conference, thanking Rayner for her “achievement”.

“And we want her back as well”, he declared, to rapturous applause and a standing ovation. “We need her back.” His leader, Sir Keir Starmer, pronounced (albeit with his trademark air of someone perpetually in discomfort), Rayner “will be a major voice for years to come”.

Steve Reed, who replaced Rayner as the Housing Secretary, pronounced his predecessor as “a true working-class hero”. Senior MP Karl Turner’s social media post went even further, hailing the Ashton-under-Lyne MP as the “best of us”, claiming Rayner “is everything the [Labour Party] is and should be about”.

These are remarkable statements to make about a former housing secretary who was disclosed by The Telegraph to have dodged £40,000 in stamp duty on the purchase of her second home in Hove, East Sussex. I am no fan of Labour, but even I struggle to see how this can be the conduct of the “best” that Turner’s party has to offer.

What were Rayner’s achievements in office?

Having set a target to build 1.5 million homes, her target immediately ran up against a building crisis as planning approvals in England dropped to the lowest in a decade. The various sycophantic obituaries of her career focus squarely on her impressive rise from a difficult background and “the venom of her political attacks”, but hardly a word on what she has actually delivered in her 10 years in Parliament.

Three weeks since her resignation, Rayner is now the subject of a fresh controversy as her taxpayer-funded BMW has reportedly been spotted ferrying her partner Sam Tarry (a former Labour MP) around, while her protection officers (also taxpayer-funded) appear to move boxes around outside the £800,000 Sussex home, which was the source of the stamp duty scandal.

We are told that Rayner has been allowed to retain the car and her security detail to shield her from threats, but that doesn’t answer questions raised about those benefits being extended to her partner in her absence. The deep sense of entitlement betrays a contempt for ordinary people who pick up the bill by paying their fair share in taxes.

Then, of course, there’s the even deeper sense of hypocrisy. While in Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, Rayner served as a relentless tormentor of her political opponents, even having to apologise for a particularly intemperate outburst in the House of Commons when she condemned Conservatives as “scum”. “One rule for them and another rule for us” was her common refrain in attacking any Tory’s transgression.

On the tax arrangement of Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative chancellor, Rayner was moved by righteous indignation to remind the nation, “[e]very pound of tax that is not delivered to the Chancellor and to the Exchequer means that it damages our public services”.

Does the Exchequer suffer any less if it misses out on tax intake from Labour politicians? Is the damage to our public services somehow mitigated when Rayner underpays her stamp duty? Why do her colleagues – who are proclaiming her to be their hero – believe that there is one rule for them and another for the rest of us?

The answer is that too many in the Labour Party are so blinded by their own sense of moral superiority that they simply cannot accept that the rules which apply to others must apply to themselves as well.

Every time this administration loses another minister to this “do as I say, not as I do” approach, it loses a little more credibility. Fallen ministers may return to Government, but I doubt credibility will.