An MP has bought a flat and paid the stamp duty that is due on the transaction. Those are the facts of a news story that has been spun into yet another attack on Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, by a right-wing newspaper.
The headline on the front-page lead story in The Daily Telegraph today is: “Angela Rayner dodges £40,000 stamp duty.” The word “dodges” implies that she has done something wrong, whereas the article itself makes plain that she has not.
The only reason for thinking that she should have paid more in stamp duty is that journalists assumed that she still owned a share of a house in her constituency, Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester. If she had, she would have been liable for the higher rate of stamp duty payable on buying a second property.
The actual news uncovered by The Telegraph, though, is that she no longer owns the Ashton-under-Lyne house, which has presumably been transferred to her husband, Mark Rayner, whom she is divorcing.
So all those headlines a few days ago, when the Sunday newspapers discovered that she had bought a flat in Hove – where she had been photographed enjoying herself on the beach – have turned out to be wrong.
She has not bought a “third home” to add to her “property empire”. She is allowed to live in a (quite grand) government flat in Admiralty Arch, which comes with the job, and she has just bought the only property that she owns.
Not only was the reporting of her flat purchase snobbish, as Flic Everett wrote for The Independent – “it’s classist, sexist, ad hominem and profoundly unfair” – it was also based on outdated information. Perhaps Rayner should have volunteered all the facts as soon as the flat purchase was reported, but she guards her family’s privacy fiercely and can be stubborn when intrusive questions are asked, including about her teenage sons, who live with their father in Ashton-under-Lyne.
Her obstinacy kept the story going when there was a fuss about her living arrangements before – whether she should have paid capital gains tax when she sold her former council house before becoming an MP. She might have been better advised to have disclosed all the facts up front, but her reluctance to give in to the right-wing press that was hounding her was understandable, and she was not found to have done anything wrong then, either.
Once again, the double standards of the right-wing press are extraordinary. Having discovered that she paid the right amount of stamp duty on the Hove flat, The Telegraph’s story then branched off into an attempt to suggest that she ought to be paying council tax on the Admiralty Arch flat – although the convention is that the government pays the council tax on ministers’ grace-and-favour residences.
The Telegraph concludes in the fifth paragraph of its story that Rayner’s arrangements are “entirely legal”, but goes on to say they “will raise questions over whether she has deliberately conducted her property affairs to pay less stamp duty and council tax”. In other words, she has chosen not to pay more tax than she has to. Given that most of The Telegraph’s money pages are devoted to providing advice to its readers on how they may do the same, the only difference must be that she is a Labour politician.
How many Conservative MPs who have bought property and paid the tax due have been accused of “dodging” by The Telegraph? How does the paper think that her behaviour compares with that of Boris Johnson, who got the taxpayer to pay for the redecoration of the prime minister’s Downing Street flat, but was eventually and reluctantly forced to pay for it himself?
The Conservative Party is making a mistake by joining in the right-wing press vendetta against Rayner. What does the Tory party think it says about working-class aspiration that it is criticising a working-class woman who has risen to the top in politics, for buying a flat by the sea and paying the right amount of tax on it?
