The backgrounds of Angela Rayner and Sir Laurie Magnus – the sleaze watchdog who holds her fate in his hands – couldn’t be more different.
Labour’s “Red Queen” is a working-class council house girl who got pregnant at 16. He’s an old Etonian “quango king”, a City grandee and a pillar of the establishment.
He’s so posh he wasn’t awarded his knighthood in the usual way by the Monarch after being nominated by 10 Downing Street. He’s a baronet whose title is hereditary.
But though Sir Laurie’s a proper toff, he’s no pushover and he doesn’t waste time. In 2023 his investigation into former Tory minister Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs took just six days.
Sir Laurie concluded that Mr Zahawi’s conduct had fallen below what was expected from a minister. So the then PM Rishi Sunak sacked him for a “serious breach of the ministerial code”.
This year, Labour minister Tulip Siddiq quit after Sir Laurie said she should have been more alert to “potential reputational risks” of ties to her aunt in an anti-corruption investigation in Bangladesh.
That inquiry took eight days, so might Sir Laurie’s Angela Rayner probe take about a week? Perhaps, though it has been suggested he’s due to go on holiday on Saturday. So could his report come before then?
Sir Laurie was appointed by Mr Sunak more than eight weeks after he became PM. At the time, there were claims that he was struggling to find a candidate.
That was because the two previous holders of the post, veteran mandarin Sir Alex Allan and former Royal courtier Sir Christopher Geidt, both quit after disagreements with Boris Johnson.
Sir Alex quit in 2020 after finding former home secretary Priti Patel guilty of bullying. But then Mr Johnson declared that she had not breached the ministerial code.
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Angela Rayner admitted to Beth Rigby that she didn’t pay enough tax on a property she bought in Hove.
Sir Christopher, a former private secretary to the Queen, quit in June 2022 after concluding Mr Johnson may have broken ministerial rules over party-gate.
So Mr Sunak turned to Sir Laurie, a former merchant banker who served on half a dozen quangos and whose long business career involved links with disgraced retail tycoon Sir Philip Green and the late tycoon Robert Maxwell.
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Rayner admits she should have paid more stamp duty
Rayner came out fighting in Sky interview
Rayner’s tax affairs statement in full
There was immediately controversy because Mr Sunak refused to give Sir Laurie the power to launch his own investigations into allegations or ministerial wrong-doing. That changed when Sir Keir Starmer became PM last year.
But before then, Sir Laurie couldn’t launch his own inquiry into the conduct of Dominic Raab over bullying allegations or Suella Braverman over claims of leaking and ignoring legal advice over asylum.
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Sky’s Paul Kelso breaks down the facts behind Angela Rayner’s stamp duty controversy.
The role of independent adviser on ministerial standards, to give Sir Laurie his official title, was created by Tony Blair in 2006. Ministers can refer themselves for investigation, as Tulip Siddiq and Angela Rayner both did.
Why was Sir Laurie chosen? A senior Square Mile insider told Sky News: “Laurie Magnus is very much a member of the City’s great and the good.”
Sir Laurence Henry Philip Magnus, 3rd Baronet is the third in a baronetcy that dates back to 1917, when it was awarded to an ancestor who represented London University in the House of Commons.
His quango CV includes the chairmanship of Historic England, a former trustee of the conservation charity the Landmark Trust, ex-chair of the National Trust, membership of the Culture Recovery Fund, a trustee of English Heritage Trust and deputy chair of the All Churches Trust.
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Has Rayner tax issues thrown uncertainty over the Starmer project?
As Historic England boss, Sir Laurie entered the row over the tearing down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, claiming such statues should not be removed but have “counter-memorials” placed alongside them.
Besides his quango roles, Sir Laurie remains a major figure in the City, as a senior adviser at investment banking group Evercore and chairing two FTSE 250 listed investment trusts.
Which means that the class divide between the old Etonian City grandee and the former shop steward and champion of workers’ rights whose fate is in his hands couldn’t be greater.
