Isn’t it marvellous that as this thing unravels it becomes spectacularly clear that “Red Queen” Ange was actually “Tory Scum” all along! She has hypocrite stamped through her like a stick of Brighton (and Hove!) rock. And if there’s one thing us Brits can’t abide, it’s a hypocrite. While professing loudly at the Labour Party Conference to hate “Tory Scum” – to play to her hard-left supporters – it turns out she was, as the sainted Margaret Hilda Thatcher so memorably said “one of us” all along.
As a working class girl made good, with two houses and a luxury pad in the heart of London, she is truly a poster child for that old-fashioned upwardly mobile, greed-is-good Thatcherism. (It is wickedly delicious, I know, that this unavoidable conclusion will make her squirm!) But trust me, I know what I’m talking about.
Recently I have been waking up in a cold sweat fearing that myself and Angela Rayner may have been separated at birth. The parallels are as spooky as they are troubling.
We are both unapologetically northern and still retain accents hewn from Pennine stone, despite having worked in the nation’s capital for the biggest part of our lives. We were both brought up with almost comical levels of poverty by today’s standards, all Coronation St cobbled streets, back-to-backs, jam butties, and scrubbed front door steps. And we are both clearly aspirational working class (a breed the Labour Party used to be quite keen on backing, but not anymore).
But, here’s where it gets really weird. We both ended up with two houses, one rented flat, and a family member disabled in an accident who, after a massive legal battle in both cases, received an award, a compensation payout.
And weirder? Angie is now my neighbour in Hove and lives about 30 seconds away on the seafront. Well… sometimes she does, when not at her other “main residence” in Tameside.
But here’s the key difference: myself and my missus always seemed to manage to pay the correct amount of tax on our homes.
And we never, ever, got confused over where we lived.
When I commuted home from the Express offices I never arrived at the wrong house in a state of bewilderment for example.
And this is because I knew where my main residence was.
And this is why her crocodile tears and cod heart-wrenching excuses for tax-dodging are utter BS.
You do not need to be a tax-expert to know where you live.
But take solace dear reader.
I imagined this Government crisis to be a classic political long goodbye, of the kind where politicians try desperately to cling on to their jobs long long after the rest of us have concluded they are toast.
Her smug grins during Prime Minister’s Questions as Kemi Badenoch failed to pull the trigger on the loaded sniper rifle which had been handed to her were sickening.
But my guess? She’ll be gone by tea-time.
And “proud to stand by her” Starmer will be more deeply and irrevocably damaged than he already is.
The Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain will stand down for tax dodging.
She brings shame on the nation.
It is the narrative of some tin-pot central American banana republic, not the once-proud Britain where integrity used to matter.
If not tonight, then at some point in forthcoming days she will be spending more time with her family following the predictable pro-forma letter of resignation with the codswallop about “becoming a distraction from the good work of the Government … blah, blah, blah”.
She got caught out. That’s all there is to it.
And if she hadn’t she would still be upwards of 40 grand to the good and no-one would know about it.
You don’t need to shed any tears – Rayner is a survivor and will do just fine.
She will likely do a few months on the naughty step then return, as all our politicians who resign on a “point of principle” do.
Or maybe she’ll join Corbyn’s rag-tag bunch?
For my money she’d be better suited to crossing over to her spiritual home which is clearly the Conservative Party.
Either way, if she does do the decent thing and stand down, if see her in the bowling club across the road I’ll be sure to buy her a large Chardonnay with the thanks of a grateful, and somewhat relieved nation.
One down, 398 to go.