Angela Rayner attacking the PM for being short? Ooh… how low can she go?

The deputy Labour leader – standing in for Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions – was all harmless, knockabout fun… until her final question, when she suddenly pulled out a knuckleduster, says Joe Murphy

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner called the prime minister ‘a pint-sized loser’ (Sky News)

You know a joke has landed when even Penny Mordaunt comes off Wordle and struggles not to snigger. Mouth twitching, her poker face struggling not to collapse, the leader of the Commons almost needed oxygen after Angela Rayner’s jibe at the “pint-sized loser” she works for.

Attack, they say, is the best form of defence. Which is lucky because Rayner doesn’t do subtle. Verbal baseball bats are more her thing. Her insult of choice – “Tory scum!” – may have been decommissioned after the murder of David Amess MP, but the rage that drives Ange is undimmed.

And they were all out to get her: half the Conservative benches seemed to have prepared gags about capital gains tax.

A quick recap. In 2010, Rayner got married and moved her toothbrush to the house owned by her new husband, Mark, a mile or two away.

By amazing coincidence, in that very same year, 2010, according to the Panama Papers leaked to the BBC some years back, an offshore trust of the newly named Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft purchased shares worth £33.9m from one of his many companies. A day after the purchase, he entered the House of Lords and became a UK taxpayer. Had the purchase happened 24 hours later, the Treasury could have taken a chunk of the millions as capital gains tax.

In 2015, Rayner sold her former council house, making a £48,000 windfall. As the Tory tabloids keep shrieking, she maybe should have paid between £1,500 and £3,000 in capital gains tax.

By another coincidence, March 2015 was the very same month that Lord Ashcroft quit the House of Lords and probably/maybe reverted to non-dom status again. A week later, he sold shares worth £11.2m. Non-dom status would, of course, have allowed him to legally avoid any capital gains tax on profits from those millions.

Back to the present day, and not one of the Tory MPs who suddenly seemed so concerned about tax avoidance bothered to raise Lord Ashcroft’s millions at Prime Minister’s Questions. Yet they were all desperate to bring up the matter raised in a book by – yes, the exact same Lord Ashcroft – about Rayner’s climb up the property ladder.

Rayner, flanked on the front bench by Rachel Reeves and Lucy Powell, opted to charge them, head on. “I know this party opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements, but the public want to know what this government is going to do about theirs.”

Oliver Dowden, standing in for Rishi Sunak who was unveiling his new pledge to up defence spending, had a better joke. Noting it was their fifth time at the despatch box, he quipped: “Any more of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.”

From my vantage point in the eaves, I noticed that the deputy prime minister has a secret stash of jokes. They’re on bits of paper pasted like a blackmail note onto the inside back cover of his ministerial folder. Like an exam cheat furtively peeking at crib notes on his sleeve, Dowden lifted the back cover of the folder whenever he needed a soundbite.

Not that Rayner was any less scripted. Her six questions were read out woodenly from a sheet and she stumbled over: “Never mind some sec- secre- secretive deep state, it’s the state of the Tory party that’s the problem. They’re in a deep state of sewage.”

The pair swapped largely good-natured banter. Another peep into his joke store had Dowden teasing: “We all know the one reform she won’t abolish – the right to buy your council house.”

Ms Rayner – so much better when she isn’t reading – hit back: “He seems to be a bit worn out. Maybe it’s the 3am calls from the ‘Bad Men…’”

It was all harmless fun, until Rayner’s last question when she suddenly pulled out a knuckleduster. Noting press reports that Dowden was urging an early general election to avert a Tory wipeout, she looked him in the eye and asked: “Has he finally realised that when he stabbed Boris Johnson in the back to get his mate into No 10 he was ditching their biggest election winner for a pint-sized loser?”

Tory MPs winced. Rayner had read their minds and spoken a painful truth out loud. A punch on a blue bruise. Sunak’s leadership rivals hid their amusement as best they could, and tried to look disapproving: after all, attacking people for being short of stature is terribly unfair, a bit like attacking gingers.

Dowden loyally upped his own aggression, telling Rayner: “She once said you shouldn’t be waiting for the police to bang on your door. She should forget her tax advice and follow her own advice.”

But it was too late for him. Rayner had pulled off a win against the odds and she sat back happily.