Rayner on the beach

Found on the beach: Angela Rayner! The Daily Mail has published photographs of Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, drinking wine on the beach at Hove and of the Victorian seafront street where she is said to own a flat. The paper described ‘the tawdry saga of Angela Rayner’s £40,000 Stamp Duty dodge over her luxury seaside apartment’ and suggested it deserved the nickname ‘Hovegate’. It claimed the story began when a café-goer spotted her distinctive red hair on the shingle, her appearance made all the more striking by a ‘camouflage’ coat with pink trim.

Rayner, born in Stockport in 1980, Rayner left school at sixteen while pregnant, trained as a care worker, and rose through the union movement before being elected MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in 2015. She became deputy leader of the Labour Party in 2020 and has since established herself as one of Westminster’s most recognisable and outspoken figures.

The Hove flat, bought for around £800,000 in May, drew controversy after Rayner admitted underpaying stamp duty by about £40,000. She said she had relied on legal advice that the property could be treated as her primary residence, having placed her share of a Manchester home into trust for her disabled son. Subsequent guidance showed the higher rate for second homes applied, and she has since contacted HMRC to settle the difference and referred herself to the independent ethics watchdog.

The row intensified yesterday when the Hove property was vandalised, with graffiti branding Rayner a ‘tax evader’ sprayed on walls and boards nearby (see Brighton and Hove News). The attack was condemned by both Downing Street and Labour as unacceptable and unjustifiable. 

For Brighton and Hove, the controversy adds another link between its seafront and national politicians. James Callaghan once kept a flat on the promenade, Norman Tebbit lived in Hove and was injured in the Grand Hotel bombing, and Caroline Lucas has long represented the city from her home nearby. And, of course, politicians of all colours come to the seafront regularly for their party conferences - indeed Rayner won’t have far to go next time the Labour Party Conference is held at the Brighton Centre.