If Rayner somehow keeps her job the public won’t forget this sorry episode or forgive those involved

Hard Rayn

FOR now, Sir Keir Starmer is standing by Angela Rayner.

How long that position can hold is anybody’s guess.

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The Deputy Prime Minister admits failing to pay around £40,000 in stamp duty, due on her seafront flat in Hove.

She claims she was badly advised by an unnamed tax expert and didn’t mean to con the taxman.

Good luck with that.

As anybody who has come into contact with HMRC knows, ignorance is NEVER any excuse.

In truth, her tearful mea culpa — made after days of denials and obfuscation — raised more questions than answers.

Who is the mysterious adviser who failed to offer corrrect advice on her second home, and will she publish it?

Did she give them all the information needed to make a proper judgment, or was she so keen to keep her tax bill down that she glossed over the details?

Why — if she really did believe that Hove was her main home — did she declare her constituency house in Greater Manchester as her primary residence to the local authority, thereby saving cash on her council tax?

Rayner has made a career out of demanding Tory resignations and once blasted: “Every pound of tax that’s not delivered to the Chancellor.. means that it damages our public services.”

Yet the PM and cabinet ministers insisted stories about her own property affairs were “smears”.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Whatever the outcome of the inquiry by ethics watchdog Sir Laurie Magnus, this is another bitter blow for the Labour Government.

It has already lost an anti-corruption minister accused of corruption and a homelessness minister who made her tenants homeless.

Now a Housing Secretary hasn’t paid the right stamp duty on her own house, while ordinary people are clobbered with ever more property taxes.

If Ms Rayner does somehow stay in her job, the public is unlikely to forget this sorry episode — or forgive those involved.

Tweet nothings

MET Commissioner Mark Rowley says his officers are being put in an impossible position over policing social media.

We have some sympathy.

Virtue-signalling politicians introduced bad laws which curbed free speech while leading to an explosion of absurd “non-crime hate incidents”.

Ministers must make urgent changes.

But senior police officers CAN exercise common sense.

Instead, they are credulously listening to complainants with grudges — sending five armed officers to arrest Father Ted creator Graham Linehan as he got off a plane at Heathrow for posting online about trans activists.

Just leave the tweets…and police the streets.