It’s fair that Angela Rayner is subject to scrutiny – but not if it’s based on snobbery | Gaby Hinsliff

Labour’s deputy is of course accountable for any irregularity in her tax affairs. Yet this is starting to look like an ugly form of class-based shaming

Angela Rayner has never, to the best of my knowledge, advocated eating people. Nor has she publicly insisted on her right to wear a colander on her head.

In the Westminster scandal stakes, that makes her a positive lightweight compared with the Reform candidates suspended last weekend after being accused of these and other eccentricities, let alone to the hardened offenders already in parliament. She’s never been fined for breaking Covid rules, unlike two prime ministers I could mention: nor has she been accused, like some of their colleagues, of bullying civil servants, sexual misconduct or sending an explicit picture to someone on Grindr before panicking and handing over colleagues’ phone numbers to a potential honeytrapper.

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