O dear: those blasted rules of the game have once again upended a British government. Depending on your point of view, the Rt. Hon. Angela Rayner - erstwhile Deputy Prime Minister - has been unjustly ambushed by vexatious tax regulations which no sane person could possibly be expected to understand. Further, she is a working class lass who has suffered every disadvantage imaginable, yet who has climbed to the top of the greasy pole to occupy a senior place in the British state. Her somewhat convoluted housing arrangements reflect no more than the concern of a busy and loving mother trying to do her best for her disabled 17 year old son. Her supporters, of which there are many - even among the columnists of the Daily Telegraph - say her predicament is a victory for snobs, sexists and misogynists everywhere.
The other more straightforward narrative is that she is a gobby chav from Stockport with no discernible talent beyond a skill for self-projection - she has even described herself as a "mouthy" northerner. The lady has lived dangerously, involved herself again in some complicated and dubious property transactions and has now been found out. Her defenestration is therefore fully merited.
Either way, there cannot be a dry eye in the house. For l'affaire d'Ange contains all the classic and farcically embarrassing ingredients of scandal, incompetence and bad faith which mark ministerial resignations in the modern British state. First there is the toe curling revelation which is swiftly denied. Further revelations of dodgy dealing come to light and the miscreant doubles down while getting supportive parts of the media to spread diversionary chaff. In the next scene, a po-faced House of Commons (or the press in this case) is assured "all the relevant rules were followed". The Prime Minister then expresses his (or her) full confidence, at which point the denouement writes itself. Usually, there is a referral to whichever panjandrum it is whose role that month is to remind ministers how to behave. What normally follows is a lengthy interval while the duty apparatchik sucks his pencil and which allows anyone still awake to speculate and for those hacks who were asleep when the story originally broke to pour scorn on their competitors. At last the cast returns to the stage for the final act. The obscure civil servant produces a carefully worded note of regret, the minister writes some weaselly words of resignation and then falls on their sword. The Prime Minister sheds some crocodile tears of his (or her) own and the press goes back to speculating who is now "up" and who "down". The curtain falls and the proles disperse peacefully, having enjoyed a good laugh at the expense of their "betters".
Angela Rayner is not the first minister to conflate public duty with private interest. But she is surely the first to have the brass neck to plead mitigation that she was only trying to protect her family barely a year after she was involved in another property caper which attracted the interest of the police. The truth is surely more grubby: it seems she arbitraged her son's trust to fund the purchase of a second property for herself; took the barest minimum of conveyancing advice while ignoring the suggestions she take proper tax guidance; claimed the new dwelling was her primary residence for tax purposes and then tried to "regularise" her affairs only once she had been found out. Not only did she act in bad faith, but she also displayed the most astonishing incompetence. Worse, her inverted snob of a boss tried to defend her by effectively saying her disadvantaged background somehow entitled her to be held to a more lenient standard. You could almost hear Attlee, Bevin, Tawney, Callaghan and even Michael Foot turning in their graves.
Alas, the office of the independent commissioner for "standards" came to the only conclusion that could be supported by the evidence. In a classic civil-service formulation, Sir Laurie Magnus opined that while our Ange's latest tour round the Monopoly board was an example of "integrity", it was also (sadly) one of carelessness. Those damned and blasted rules. The poor lass who left school at sixteen; who lived in a paper bag (or some such nonsense) and had a fatherless child at seventeen; who doled it out to the toffs and became a darling of the Left - well, he almost sighed with regret, she had "broken the ministerial code". Exit Angela.
How have we allowed ourselves to be ruled by such utter berks? If democracy is supposed to confer some moral as well as electoral authority, how come government ministers and officials need to be told constantly what does and does not constitute ethical behaviour? Is it too much to ask that they be acquainted with what is right and wrong, not just with what they think they can get away with? When personal chicanery is accompanied by incompetence in office, then the chips must surely be down. By any measure, Sir Keir's tenure of Number 10 has been a shambles: unintelligent ministers making decisions way beyond their intellectual ability; a slavish devotion to ever more convoluted process rather than outcomes; a complete lack of leadership when problems occur and the supine acceptance of incompetence and mediocrity until looming disaster prompts a moving of the deck chairs. This Labour government has the lot.
Sir Keir will surely have cause to regret Sir Magnus's letter. Replete with the usual bromides of the Whitehall mandarinate, it has merely anaesthetised Rayner rather than buried her under the ton of housing rubble which she deserves. As erstwhile housing minister, even she should appreciate the irony. She can also breath easy - politics is now all about the game played at Westminster rather than the public good. A sense of shame or an awareness of personal ignorance are no longer pre-requisites for holders of public office We can be sure of her re-incarnation in all its gobby glory as she passes "Go" yet again.
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