“In the end Angela Rayner had to go,” said Steven Swinford in The Times . Her tax affairs and her living arrangements were complicated, but the case turned on a point that was “remarkably simple”. She had, she admitted, underpaid £40,000 in stamp duty by wrongly claiming that her new £800,000 flat in Hove was her only home. And though she’d tried to blame her failure to pay the second-home surcharge on bad legal advice, that defence started to unravel when the conveyancing firm she had used told the press that they were being scapegoated, and that they had not given her any advice on her tax position – which was not straightforward.

‘Catnip’ to voters

Rayner, it transpired, had sold her 25% stake in her former marital home, in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, to a trust she and her

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