Do the allegations about Angela Rayner’s tax affairs have any merit?

As the fuss about the Labour Party’s deputy leader and her house sale rumbles on, Sean O’Grady looks at the facts behind the story, and what it could mean for Labour

The main thing to say is that no one, possibly including Rayner herself, knows whether she did anything wrong (Getty)

Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has been accused, variously, of evading tax, avoiding tax, lying, and misleading the public as well as her party leader about her tax affairs. The allegations arise from a book by Michael Ashcroft, a former deputy chair of the Tory party and no stranger to tax-based controversies himself.

In Red Queen? The Unauthorised Biography of Angela Rayner, Ashcroft alleges that, long before she was an MP, she bought her former council house, in Vicarage Road in Stockport, with a 25 per cent “right to buy” discount. In due course, she got married and cohabited with Mark Rayner, and she sold the house in 2015 at a gross profit of £48,000.

Ashcroft used information from the electoral register, Rayner’s marriage certificate, and the address given on the birth certificates of her children in his research, but the evidence is inconclusive, and even if it were possible to establish where she and her husband/partner were living at various points, it may be irrelevant from a tax liability perspective. The great irony may be that both Rayner and Ashcroft are misunderstanding the regulations relating to capital gains tax (CGT), albeit in their own different ways.