The matter of Angela Rayner's house sale isn't going away.....

Germanshepherdsmum

Can anyone other than someone there at the time ‘know what she has actually allegedly done’? We can only know what the allegations are.

As far as I know, the allegation is to do with electoral fraud (not tax evasion, buying a council house, sounding common, being a teenage mother or anything else) so why is so much being dragged up?

Being a 16 year old unmarried mother is generally looked down on Jane.

There is also an allegation of tax evasion growstuff.

It is possible, probable IMO, that she made an honest mistake or was badly advised. And is being advised to say nothing now.
If she’s forced out over this it will be lamentable.

The sum is trivial. AR seems to me to be personally honourable, not a loophole seeker.

And feisty, rather an Eliza Doolittle character.

So would I growstuff.

I’ve written about the tax side. HMRC are not going to be interested. It isn't a police matter.

Re the electoral side - I don’t undertand what wrongdoing is being alleged.

The General Election of 2015 was the only one held under the rules of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act 2011.

Rayner was selected as the Labour Party's prospective parliamentary candidate for Ashton-under-Lyne in September 2014.

The Fixed-term Parliament Act 2011 led to the dissolution of Parliament on 30 March 2015 and the scheduling of the election on 7 May 2015.

Rayner sold her house on 17 March 2015.

The deadline for submission of election nomination forms is 19 working days before the election which would have been the 10 April 2015.

The candidate’s address does not have to be on the ballot, nor does not have to be in the constituency in which the person intends to stand.

As already explained, for voting purposes in Parliamentary elections, the Electoral Commission says:

If you split your time between two homes, you may be able to register to vote at both addresses. For example, you might own two properties and split your time between them, or you might spend time at different family addresses.

You can only vote in one constituency in a General Election or referendum but you can vote in more than one council election if properties are in different wards.

It’s entirely plausible for Rayner to have been registered to vote at one address (her owned property which she was perfectly entitled to do if she spent time there) and to have put another address on her election nomination forms which, in all probability, were completed after the sale of her house.

I wish she had aspired to elocution lessons

That comment says more about the listener than the speaker.

It’s quite possible Starmers team saw documents relating in part to the allegations when first made: but not their entiretywhich I’m getting more and more confused about)

But when it gets to the stage of the press door stopping neighbours it’s time to do what they have: wait for due process and in the meantime investigate with lawyers themselves.

Being a 16 year old unmarried mother is generally looked down on Jane.

By whom?

How about being a sixteen year old single mother, and working hard enough to become an MP, while looking after a disabled child and working as a carer?

Is that looked down upon?

Plenty on here talk proudly about how hard they had it, and how far they've come.

MissAdventure 👏👏👏

It’s simple really. Tories and the right wing media do not like Rayner and want to see her discredited and distracted by any means.

Ashcroft’s obsession with her is odd. Even The Telegraph says Red Queen?, Michael Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography of the deputy Labour leader, is detailed, but prefers triviality to true intelligence.

Party chair and deputy, Holden (2019 majority 1,146) and Daley (2019 majority 105) will both be out on their ears in a few months. This barrel-bottom scraping is their last spiteful hurrah.

Ashcroft’s obsession with her is odd
Ashcroft can be vengeful.
Perhaps she annoyed him for some reason.

Yes, probably by being a sixteen year old single parent who worked hard and did well for HERSELF.

Good grief, she needs elocution lessons, pregnant at 16, should she have had an abortion, sex at 16 , shock, horror,

Or 15?

Was she 15 GSM have you counted the months ?

I think she was 16 when pregnant.
I've read before that she believes that pregnancy saved her from going off the rails.

Perhaps I could leave that to you. Maybe even earlier. Just what we want to represent the UK on the world stage in Starmer’s absence.

I'd be more than happy for her to represent me.

Public school, entitled idiots, who behave like children don't float my boat.

Public school types tend to float the boats of other world leaders (I exclude the likes of Trump, another embarrassment).

They need to float ours, you know, the people they supposedly represent.

How could Johnson, with all the children he has knocked out?

Or is it different because he has the right accent?

Oh its silly bear baiting. Which MP would come out 'clean' if you went through everything. And in her case if tax is due the sum is so small Bozzer and mates would consider it small change - and the distance between to 2 possible addresses is tiny.

An MP only needs to float the boats of enough people in their constituency to get elected. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that she floated the boats of the right people in her party to obtain the position she now has. How often have you seen her described as the albatross round Starmer’s neck?

It doesn’t look like anybody at The Guardian could bring themselves to review or maybe even read Red Queen but Zoe Williams did review Red Knight about Starmer whch sets the tone:

… it emerged over time that not only did the Labour leader not wish to cooperate, he had asked his associates not to either. “His response,” Ashcroft concludes, “has done a fine job in convincing me that he thinks it would be perfectly acceptable for him to move into 10 Downing Street without a book of this kind asking some probing questions about him.” Well, hold on a tick: I definitely never got that memo, that it was a matter of democratic accountability for any prospective prime minister to have their life story told by Michael Ashcroft.

If this querulous overture makes little sense on its own terms, it nevertheless helpfully locates the two main qualities that limit Red Knight as a work of searching biography. The first is the author’s own narcissism, which leaves him blankly unable to understand a worldview other than his own, mystified by behaviour and life choices that will strike your average pinko as completely normal.

The broader political initiative, a billionaire policing the boundaries of working-class authenticity so intensely that nobody without rickets can ever be Labour leader again, is so absurd it’s almost endearing; but it doesn’t provide a very three-dimensional portrait of [Starmer].

Then, I hopped over to Amazon to read the reviews of Red Queen.

I note from the acknowledgements that Michael Ashcroft did not do his own research on this book.

Poorly-researched and politically-motivated tosh.

Michael started his very sad crusade with his book on David Cameron which lacks any evidence and proof and continues in his unauthorised autobiography on Angela Rayner. Most of what he says is conjecture and guess work at best in what in my opinion is an attempt to smear.

Michael Ashcroft has skin in the game for his support of the Tory party, a major donor former Treasurer and subsequent Peer. The interesting little titbit about this woman buying her council house is audacious stone throwing. Actually a lot of it seems just a great opportunity for this 'author' to denigrate the woman. No matter what your politics I hope you feel as I did halfway though..that I was just not interested in pretty vicious gossip after all.

… what I was met with is an unhinged smear fest, throughly disappointed...and I'm not a Labour voter or a fan of Rayner either.

So it is this tosh which has triggered the current controversy?

Miss A agree with every word you have written.