Best Of

Official documents show she has a £650,000 mortgage on the seaside flat through NatWest.

The scale of the loan will have left her with mortgage repayments as high as £4,000 a month while her salary against an income of £5,400 a month after tax. As deputy prime minister she was taking home £8,100.

Following her resignation, she will have just £1,400 a month left over with two teenage children to look after, covering food and clothing bills, gas and electricity, holidays and sundry other costs.

She also has a £40,000 tax bill to pay as well as a likely penalty of £12,000 plus interest on top of about £1,000 – a total bill of £53,000.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/05/angela-rayner-may-have-to-sell-hove-flat-after-losing-job/

Shit happens

Your comments of the last few days strongly indicated you'd be delighted to see Rayner humiliated and forced to resign. I'm not quite sure why though I suspect it's to do with what she said about Conservatives while in Opposition.

All of that being said, none of this sits well with me.

Since the Expenses Crisis, successive Governments have imposed levels of probity on Ministers and MPs which are draconian in extremis. As with other Prime Ministers, Starmer wants his Cabinet team to be seen to be beyond reproach when it comes to their personal financial affairs so while we can live with incompetence and stupidity, at least we don't have to live with corruption (apparently).

Rayner has made mistakes and breached the MInisterial Code making her position untenable. Had I done the same, I imagine I'd be looking at having to repay the unpaid Stamp Duty and perhaps a penalty but I wouldn't lose my job over it and this is where I'm uncomfortable with all this and was when it was applied to Conservatives.

We penalise mistakes rather than malevolence. Yes, let's go after Ministers who receive money from third party lobbying companies but this is Rayner's private domestic arrangements. I don't think she should be sacked for what she has done but the Ministerial Code dictates otherwise and them's the rules currently.

@paulhutcheon

Confirmed: Douglas Alexander is the new Scotland Secretary.

It is also an incredible comeback. He was in the Cabinet in the last Labour Government and was Scotland Sec under Tony Blair.

Yes that's a real bridge back to those heady days. Oasis reunion and now this.

Loved the 90s.

Me too, sort of. Easily the most eventful (good and bad) period of my life.

I started the decade living in Fife, ended it living in Barbados. In between I met the love of my life, got two degrees and travelled to all kinds of interesting places, saw lots of great bands, and above all else I was young and it was fantarctic.

Just before the 90s, but:
The home i made with Bella became a house of pain
We weathered it together bound by a ball and chain
Is started up in fife, and ended up in tears (oh dear)
But i send her my love with a bang on the ear
You did better than Mike Scott.

@paulhutcheon

Confirmed: Douglas Alexander is the new Scotland Secretary.

It is also an incredible comeback. He was in the Cabinet in the last Labour Government and was Scotland Sec under Tony Blair.

Yes that's a real bridge back to those heady days. Oasis reunion and now this.

Loved the 90s.

It was a glorious time. We didn’t realise how unnaturally, and artificially, lucky a time it was. All the way up until 11 September 2001. What followed was 24 years (and counting) of disaster after disaster, financial crisis after financial crisis, and political and economic stagnation.

In the mid to late 1990s we had low energy prices, a post Cold War peace dividend, golden demographics with a very low dependency ratio, affordable but buoyant housing market, naff but energetic popular culture, windfalls from bank demutualisations, a soaring stockmarket, and a string of very good summers peaking in 1995.

The England cricket team was shit though.

There have been worse decades, but much of the nineties felt stagnant, waiting for something to happen. Thatcherism was dead, but the Major years were a grey twilight. In large part that is what New Labour exploited, being young, fresh, and in full technicolour. I bought into it and for the first few years it worked.

Since then we have been sold different snakeoils, from Brexit to Corbyn to Johnson. Now we await Farage's snakeoil. The nineties only look good in retrospect as a positive contrast to what came after. We never learn. Think things can't get worse? They always can.

In retrospect, we haven’t had a prime minister as good as Major since, apart from pre Iraq Blair. Each PM since has been worse than their predecessor.

Sunak was better than Truss, Starmer than Sunak.