Keir Starmer has a hard-won reputation for ruthlessness when it comes to dispensing with ministers who cause the government embarrassment. But the future of his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, is the toughest call of its kind.
Every time Starmer has been confronted with this kind of decision since the very early days of his leadership, his instinct has been to cut loose.
But his praise for Rayner was extravagant at prime minister’s questions and sympathetic about her family circumstances that led to the error on stamp duty. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has refused to join the chorus calling for her resignation.
So might Starmer break the habit of a lifetime and back his beleaguered deputy?
Scholars of recent history may suggest otherwise. Starmer has always chosen the most brutal possible path when a minister or aide’s standards fall short.
The Labour leader set himself up as the polar opposite of his then Tory opponent, Boris Johnson, who defended Priti Patel despite a conclusive bullying inquiry, or Robert Jenrick’s links with property developers – and who eventually came a cropper over his defence of Chris Pincher after an alleged groping incident.
Within his first few months as leader, Starmer brushed aside any early efforts towards party unity: he fired his leadership rival Rebecca Long-Bailey for tweets endorsing a controversial interview with Maxine Peake and later removed the whip from Jeremy Corbyn after the EHRC’s investigation into antisemitism.
But Starmer has been just as harsh with his allies; the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, was forced to resign despite her having disclosed a fraud conviction to him many years earlier. He also oversaw the departure of loyalists such as Tulip Siddiq from the Treasury, over questions on her connections to her aunt’s Bangladeshi regime, and Rushanara Ali, the homelessness minister, because of her arrangements as a landlord.
None of those tests come close to what Starmer now faces in terms of his deputy. Rayner and Starmer have had bitter differences, including in the aftermath of Hartlepool byelection when Starmer’s own position was under threat and his furious strategists saw she was poised to take advantage.
She has long had a target on her back from the rightwing press, from allegations over the sale of her council home – later cleared – to her exuberant declarations of Tory “scum” at late-night Labour conferences.
But at this moment of peril for Rayner, she is fortunate to be in a relatively powerful position.
She has become the standard bearer for the party’s left – despite being a relative moderate and distrusted by former Corbynites – who has agitated for higher wealth taxes and pushed through major reforms to housing and employment rights. She is the authentic working-class voice that Labour has otherwise found it hard to engage and articulate for the wider public.
She is popular with the party grassroots and an obvious electoral asset. On the LabourList cabinet rankings, Rayner is the second-most popular – behind just Ed Miliband.
And it was just weeks ago that Rayner saved the government from the almost total collapse of authority – as she urged No 10 to make more concessions to welfare rebels, knowing they would otherwise lose the vote in the Commons, putting Starmer’s position as prime minister at risk. At that point it looked as if she had never been more powerful.
Though Starmer and Rayner are not natural allies, the two have grown closer in recent years. Starmer sees her strengths as a communicator and he is effusive in praising her in interviews. The prime minister clearly believes there is much to sympathise with in the family circumstances – her divorce, her trust for her disabled son – which led to this error.
Such affection does not extend to many of his more hardline aides in No 10, who have long seen her as a liability. It is no exaggeration to say that if Rayner were any other cabinet minister, her resignation would be a foregone conclusion.
There is a very recent precedent. Nadhim Zahawi was sacked as Tory party chair after he failed to disclose that HMRC was investigating his tax affairs.
So to stand by Rayner would be a change in form for Starmer – though there would be reasons to do so, beyond sympathy with her personal circumstances.
As deputy leader of the party, Rayner has her own mandate from the membership. That makes her removal as deputy leader not in his gift and her job as deputy prime minister far more complicated. A move against her would further worsen Starmer’s relations with his own MPs and members. But he would have the power to remove her as housing secretary.
Should she go, Rayner is not only the candidate of the party’s left who may one day seek to succeed Starmer – she is also the candidate of many of the party’s women who feel it so acutely that Labour has never had a female leader.
Out of office, she could galvanise opposition to Starmer’s faltering leadership among backbenchers in a way none of her departing predecessors have ever managed.
