Leaving school aged 16, pregnant and with no qualifications, Angela Rayner has had a meteoric rise to the second-highest office in the UK – and a spectacular fall from grace.
Sir Keir Starmer’s right-hand woman has now resigned after she admitted to Sky News political editor Beth Rigby she had not paid enough stamp duty on a second home she bought in Hove, East Sussex, earlier this year.
Politics latest: Angela Rayner resigns
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Rayner admits she didn’t pay enough tax
Growing up in poverty on a council estate in Stockport, Greater Manchester, Angela Bowen (her maiden name) and her two siblings were brought up by her grandmother, as her mother had bipolar disorder. She has said they had no books because her mother could not read or write.
She left school at the age of 16, without any qualifications, after becoming pregnant and has said her son, Ryan, “saved me from where I could have been, because I had a little person to look after”.
The teenage mother, now 45, studied part-time and gained a qualification in social care, working for Stockport Council as a care worker.
She entered politics when she was elected as a Unison trade union representative and then convenor of Unison North West – the region’s most senior official, becoming a Labour Party member during her time there.
Angela Rayner in 2016, a year after becoming an MP
She married Unison official Mark Rayner in 2010 and they had two sons, Charlie and Jimmy. Charlie, now 17, was born at 23 weeks old and is disabled. It is the trust set up for him that meant she believed the Hove flat was not a secondary home so she did not have to pay more stamp duty on it.
In 2017, her eldest son Ryan had a son, making Ms Rayner a grandmother at the age of 37. She gave herself the nickname “Grangela”.
She and her husband separated in 2020 and their divorce was completed in 2023. Since 2022, she has been in a relationship with former Labour MP Sam Tarry, with a break in 2023.
Pic: PA
NHS compensation and a trust
Days before her resignation, she revealed compensation was paid to Charlie by the NHS due to the circumstances around his birth, which left him with “life-long disabilities”.
A trust was set up to manage the compensation and to ensure her son was properly looked after, and so that he and his brother could remain living in their family home in Ashton-under-Lyne as part of a “nesting arrangement”, where children of divorced parents live in one house while parents take it in turn to stay there.
She said she sold her stake in that home to the trust in January this year and used that money as a deposit on the Hove flat.
The Labour MP said she was given legal advice that the coastal flat did not have to be considered as a second home for stamp duty but sought further legal counsel after media reports claimed she avoided £40,000 in stamp duty.
Her initial lawyers said they never gave her tax advice and said they were being made “scapegoats”.
Ms Rayner gave a tearful interview to Sky’s Beth Rigby before her resignation, telling the Electoral Dysfunction podcast she had spoken to her family about “packing it all in”.
MP to Labour deputy in five years
Ms Rayner rose up the Labour ranks quickly after becoming an MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in 2015.
She was made deputy Labour Party leader in 2020 and was made deputy prime minister and housing, communities and local government secretary after last summer’s general election.
A self-described socialist, “but not a Corbynite” (in her own words), she became well known for calling the Conservatives “scum”, for which she eventually apologised after initially refusing to.
Pic: Reuters
Council house and donor controversies
During last summer’s election campaign, Ms Rayner was investigated by Greater Manchester Police over allegations she misled tax officials in the sale of her council house in 2015 under the right to buy scheme.
She was cleared of any wrongdoing and HMRC concluded she did not owe any capital gains tax. She accused the Tories of using “desperate tactics” against her and went on to win her seat with a 19.1% majority.
Not long after becoming deputy PM and housing secretary, she was embroiled in another scandal in which she was accused of failing to properly register her use of Labour peer Lord Waheed Alli’s $2.5m New York apartment and being given clothes worth £3,550 by him.
She later announced she would no longer accept clothes from donors.
Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner during a visit to a construction site in Cambridge. Pic: PA
Building pledge
One of the Labour government’s biggest pledges was to build 1.5m new homes in this parliament and, as housing secretary, this came under Ms Rayner’s remit.
Sir Keir admitted in December the pledge might be “a little too ambitious”.
Ms Rayner was warned by some of the UK’s biggest developers there was not enough skilled labour to get anywhere near that target, but she has insisted it will happen.
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‘House building target is achievable’
She also led the charge to overhaul planning rules, announcing planning officers would be able to rubberstamp development proposals without permission from council committees if they complied with locally agreed plans.
The changes will be made through the planning and infrastructure bill, which was introduced to parliament in March and is making its way through the Commons.
It also promises to unblock 150 infrastructure projects, such as gigafactories, windfarms and railways, while protecting the environment and nature by setting up a fund to help builders meet their environmental obligations faster by pooling contributions to fund larger nature protections
Right to buy
In February, somewhat controversially given she bought the council house she grew up in, Ms Rayner announced it would be harder for tenants to buy their own council homes to help reverse the housing stock shortage.
She also announced “Awaab’s Law” – introduced by the Conservatives in 2023 and named after two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died from damp and mould – would come into force in October 2025, forcing social housing landlords to fix dangerous damp and mould in a set amount of time and emergency hazards within 24 hours.
In her role as deputy PM, Ms Rayner occasionally stood in for Sir Keir at Prime Minister’s Questions, one time facing Tory Oliver Dowden and saying it was the “battle of the gingers”.
