The real question isn’t what Angela Rayner did – it’s why the Tories are so set on targeting her | Gaby Hinsliff

Angela Rayner has never, to the best of my knowledge, advocated eating people. Nor has she publicly insisted on her right to wear a colander on her head.

In the Westminster scandal stakes, that makes her a positive lightweight compared with the Reform candidates suspended last weekend after being accused of these and other eccentricities, let alone to the hardened offenders already in parliament. She’s never been fined for breaking Covid rules, unlike two prime ministers I could mention: nor has she been accused, like some of their colleagues, of bullying civil servants, sexual misconduct or sending an explicit picture to someone on Grindr before panicking and handing over colleagues’ phone numbers to a potential honeytrapper.

The worst I’ve heard colleagues say of Rayner is that she can be a bit difficult, by which they mostly seem to mean the kind of defensiveness that often goes with years of being patronised and judged, among the other complex emotional legacies of a chaotic and insecure childhood. She compares herself often and aptly to John Prescott, another working-class deputy leader routinely mocked and underestimated, who was nonetheless able to reach parts of the party his leader never could. Both are tough as old boots in some ways, but with the kind of unexpectedly thin skins and hidden insecurities that invariably attract playground bullies. For a while now, it’s been clear that in a general election campaign Rayner was likely to become a target.

Having tried and failed to drive much of a wedge between Keir Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the Tories are now stress-testing the relationship between him and Rayner, which has vastly improved since he tried to demote her in 2021 but still has its faultlines. Today, police reopened an investigation into claims she may have broken electoral law by giving false information about where she lived before getting elected, which she denies. She’s also facing questions over whether she owes capital gains tax over the sale of her old council house back in 2015. Rayner swears not, insisting she has taken independent advice that confirms she doesn’t owe a penny.

Even if that advice somehow turns out to be wrong, then the sum involved – maybe £1,500 at most – is peanuts compared with the reportedly seven-figure sum that the former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi had to repay in his dispute with HMRC, or the fortune that the former Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft (whose biography of Rayner started this hare running) must have saved during his years as a non-dom. Labour’s seemingly impregnable poll lead, meanwhile, suggests voters are way beyond caring: they just want this government gone. Yet the targeting of Rayner still represents a particularly pernicious and unpleasant form of political attack, which eventually Labour may have to confront in a more serious fashion.

Richard Holden, the Tory chairman leading the charge, honed his tactics pursuing the utter non-scandal of Starmer sharing a takeaway and a beer with colleagues (including Rayner) after a campaign trip under Covid restrictions. “Beergate” fell predictably flat after the police found no breach of the rules, but by then had arguably served its purpose: Labour had to waste precious airtime rebutting nonsense, while crucially Starmer found it harder to attack Boris Johnson over the latter’s Covid rule breaches until he had himself been cleared. Similarly, Reeves is now being dogged by questions about Rayner’s house while trying to promote Labour’s plans for tackling tax avoidance.Labour’s refusal so far to publish Rayner’s tax advice – coupled with the way her colleagues keep saying they haven’t actually seen it, while stoutly defending her – has arguably not helped, inadvertently allowing the story to keep rumbling on.

That reticence may reflect a reluctance to give in to the rightwing press, or an understandable desire to protect Rayner’s children and former husband from what’s starting to look like an ugly form of class-based shaming. Rayner’s story is that she didn’t move in full-time with her then husband, Mark, the father of her youngest children, but kept the council house she was so proud of buying herself; and that as the mother of a desperately ill premature baby plus an older son from her previous relationship, she was running constantly from pillar to post, barely knowing where she’d left her clothes the night before.

Plenty of readers will sympathise with all of that. But forcing her to publicly justify an unconventional domestic set-up is one way of chipping away at her confidence while reminding a certain kind of voter – the sort already inclined to look down on her for getting pregnant at 16, and no longer being with the father – that Rayner’s life has been sometimes messier round the edges than those of politicians who have been polishing their CVs since prep school.

If Rayner has done something wrong, she should obviously be held accountable. The enormous odds she overcame to get here don’t exempt her from the same scrutiny that rightly applies to anyone in public life. But nor should she be targeted because of where she comes from, or because she hasn’t lived her entire life professionally conscious of how it might look a decade later to the papers. “John is John,” was the formula Blair eventually developed to deal with the fallout from an endlessly goaded Prescott snapping and punching a voter. All these years on, it shouldn’t need saying that Angela is Angela; and that all she’s asking for is not to be unjustly punished for it.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

• This article was updated on 12 April 2024 to reflect that police have reopened an investigation into claims that Angela Rayner may have broken electoral law.

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