Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner now has three homes – one in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, one a grace and favour apartment in London’s majestic Admiralty House and now the third, a superb seafront flat in fashionable Hove.
Yet the Government she belongs to does not even want us to have second homes, let alone third ones, and is implementing a severe council tax raid on such property.
True, the double tax was a Tory idea, but Labour has happily proceeded with it.
How can she behave like this, while punishing others who aspire to do the same thing?
And how can she do this while her colleagues plan yet more raids on home owners in November’s Budget? Will Labour never grasp that most of us have put our whole lives into our homes?
The great British desire for home ownership began with a simple wish to have a place to call our own, and some solid token, at the end of our lives, of the work we have done.
Once, millions could obtain a real stake in society and the hope of handing on an inheritance to their children.
The sale of council houses allowed huge numbers of people to do what their parents could never have dreamed of.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner now has a third home – a superb seafront flat in fashionable Hove. Pictured: Rayner enjoying leisure time on Hove beach
Angela Rayner has added an £800,000 seaside apartment to her burgeoning property empire
The Deputy Prime Minister’s home in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency
But since the Blair years, home ownership has become increasingly difficult, especially for the young.
Prices have climbed so high that many now live in houses they could not currently afford.
For house ownership has also become one of the very few ways ordinary people have of protecting their savings against the menace of inflation.
It is not their fault that the general shrivelling in the value of money has put their unspectacular homes within reach of such taxes.
And so the Government has turned its jealous, greedy eye on all those homes we have worked and saved so hard and so long to buy.
We did this with taxed income, and so we thought they were ours by right to hand on as we wished.
It appears that Sir Keir Starmer and his Government do not agree. Ingenious schemes are being assembled in Treasury back rooms to come after these modest but important possessions. Will it be a Council Tax revaluation? Or will it be done through Inheritance Tax or some sort of sales penalty?
We do not yet know, but we may be sure that they will get us one way or the other, selling or buying, coming or going, living or dying.
The Labour Government Rayner belongs to does not even want us to have second homes, let alone third ones
And this is why it matters that Angela Rayner is doing so well in her own personal housing market.
Politics is one of the few trades or professions through which a normal person can be lifted, at a stroke, from ordinary wages into seriously high earnings.
As Deputy Prime Minister, for example, she now earns almost as much as a middle-ranking BBC presenter. And good luck to her.
But perhaps as she enjoys the seaside delights of her fine new premises in Hove, she might think of all the others who have worked harder and longer to obtain less than what she now has.
And she might pause to wonder if it is right or just or wise to penalise them because Chancellor Rachel Reeves cannot balance the national books.
