The chancellor Rachel Reeves’s defence for breaking the law is that she made an “inadvertent mistake”. She did not know, she told Sir Keir Starmer, that she was supposed to buy a licence to rent out her home in south London when she and her family moved into Downing Street.
Except the next day, it emerged that her husband, who had dealt with the letting agent, was told about the requirement for a licence. Not only had she broken the law, but she had misled the prime minister about it. “Inadvertently”, of course.
It says nothing complimentary about the chancellor of the Exchequer that she failed to pay sufficient attention to the detail of her own financial affairs. She should have checked that her legal obligations had been met, rather than relying on the letting agent’s assurances to her husband.
And she should have established the facts in full before assuring Sir Keir on Thursday that there was, in effect, “nothing to see here”.
Equally, the prime minister was at fault for accepting her initial account of the oversight so quickly, and for failing to insist that Sir Laurie Magnus, the adviser on ministerial interests, spend more than a few minutes investigating what had happened.
Sir Keir gave the impression that he was keen to rush out a statement exonerating his chancellor because he could not afford to lose her – in a way that he was not so eager to do for Angela Rayner, his troublesome former deputy.
The bottom line in Ms Reeves’s case, although it took a further 24 hours to establish all the relevant facts, is that she fell short of the high standard of propriety that could be expected of her. She could claim in mitigation that the letting agent had undertaken to obtain the licence but had failed to do so. But in the end, in law, she and her husband were liable for their compliance.
The prime minister – with Sir Laurie’s letter for cover – has taken the indulgent view that Ms Reeves’s inadvertent law-breaking is not a resigning matter.
That is not how Ms Reeves and Sir Keir have seen it, however, when similar errors have been made by other politicians. Not only Ms Rayner, whose resignation Sir Keir accepted when she made the inadvertent error of underpaying stamp duty on a property purchase, for which she apologised and which she promised to put right. If Sir Laurie found that Ms Rayner had broken the ministerial code, it is puzzling that he made no such finding in Ms Reeves’s case.
But also, when in opposition, both Ms Reeves and Sir Keir demanded the resignations of Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson for their “inadvertent mistake” during a coronavirus lockdown of attending a work meeting that included a short break to celebrate the prime minister’s birthday.
Sir Keir adopted a sanctimonious moral tone in promising that his government would observe higher ethical standards than the outgoing administration, and yet within days of taking office, he and several of his senior ministers, including Ms Reeves, found themselves mired in sleaze.
He and his chancellor accepted gifts of clothes and concert tickets – which they admitted, in effect, that they should not have done when they announced that they would not accept such donations in future.
There is a lesson here, not just for ministers, but for the opposition parties. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has unwisely called for Ms Reeves’s resignation, perhaps having forgotten that she herself broke the law – and deliberately, rather than inadvertently – when, as a Tory activist in her twenties, she hacked into Harriet Harman’s website.
Ms Badenoch should have taken a different tack, perhaps, and suggested that the laws on renting are so complex that not even a Labour chancellor can understand them.
All politicians would do better to devote less of their efforts to demanding that their opponents resign, or making promises of holier-than-thou moral standards, and more to making doubly sure that they always obey the strict letter of the law of the land.
