I’ve interviewed Angela Rayner a number of times and know her to be a robust operator with a very thick skin. 

But on Wednesday morning, as she walked into our interview to admit that she had underpaid tax on her Hove home and explain the personal circumstances around that, she was visibly upset.

For days, this story has run on and now we have a better picture of why. The deputy prime minister told me she had to ask for court permission to release details of her domestic arrangements to give the background to the tax trouble she now finds herself in. And on Wednesday, she revealed all.

Politics latest: Why the deputy PM nearly resigned

It is a complicated and personal story, but in essence, her family had a trust set up in 2020 to provide for her son who has lifelong disabilities to ensure that he would be provided for and protected.

When she divorced her husband in 2023, some of the interest in the family home was transferred to the trust and then in 2025, she sold her remaining interest in the property to her teenage son’s trust.

She then used the proceeds from that to buy the new property in Hove, using the money from her family home in Ashton to pay the deposit.

Ms Rayner says she was advised that the home she bought was liable for the standard rate of stamp duty. It now turns out that advice was wrong and she owes tens of thousands in underpaid tax, because Hove is classified as her second home rather than her main residence.

She says it was a genuine mistake and has referred herself to the PM’s independent standards commissioner and informed HMRC. She says she will pay any additional tax owed.

The deputy PM was clearly upset in our interview by having to disclose private details about her teenage children.

I was left in little doubt that she had felt forced to share information about them that she really didn’t want to share.

She also admitted that she had discussed packing it all in with her ex-husband and children rather than putting this personal stuff into the public domain, but her family wanted her to go public to answer media reports that she had acted in a “hypocritical way”.

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“We felt that under the circumstances that having that reputation, for me as their mother, was more damaging than correcting the record on what we were trying to do,” she said.

But this is much more than just trying to save Ms Rayner’s reputation. Her political career is on the line, and, at the moment, it is unclear whether she will be able to continue as deputy prime minister.

She told me in our interview that the prime minister “knows the circumstances” and “knows the challenges that my son has faced and the background to all of that”, and it is now for the PM’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, to look at the evidence that she was advised she did not have to pay a stamp duty surcharge.

He has a reputation for being quick and if he finds Ms Rayner broke the ministerial code, it will be hard to see how Sir Keir Starmer will not accept that advice.

On top of that, HMRC is also investigating the deputy prime minister and if she is found to have been careless around her tax, she might face a penalty on top of the stamp duty owed, which will again put her under huge pressure.

There is also the political fall out for a politician who has gone in hard on Tories over tax questions for years.

Defending her from the attacks that are now surely to come is going to burn through a lot of political capital of a government already in trouble. Will her colleagues around the cabinet table and on the backbenches have the stomach for it?

When I asked her in our interview whether she really believed her position was sustainable, given she had underpaid on tax and that she was the housing minister, she told me that she hoped “people can see what has happened and see that I wasn’t trying to dodge tax”, and when she realised that advice was inaccurate she “took immediate steps to do the right thing -you should pay the tax that is owed”.

“Hopefully, people can see there isn’t any intention to deceive, to avoid, to be hypocritical in the way in which I have conducted myself,” she said.

Ms Rayner is never far from the headlines and has often found herself under fire in her political career, rising to the second most powerful office in the country from the most humble of backgrounds.

But she knows too that despite complicated family issues, she has made a very serious error indeed and one which she would have been quick to criticise had the perpetrator been a political opponent.

She has come out fighting today, but whether she can survive is now beyond her control.

To her most savage critics – from Tories to the far left – she’s “Rotten Rayner”, a tax evader, freeloader and a “low life… on the make”.

To her trade union friends, she’s a victim of misogyny who right-wing politicians are attempting to hound out because she’s working class.

And after her tearful interview on Sky News, even among some of her political opponents there’s a degree of sympathy for Angela Rayner too.

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But amid the rancorous debate among MPs about whether she should stay or go, there’s one part of her defence that is attracting scepticism from friends and foes.

That’s her claim that she was initially given duff advice by a solicitor. Really? If she has evidence to substantiate that, she may be in the clear, though there’d no doubt be accusations of an establishment stitch-up.

But if not – and the city grandee who’s the PM’s ethics adviser – the Eton and Oxford-educated baronet Sir Laurie Magnus – rejects her defence, she’ll almost certainly have to go.

And with her resignation – or sacking – would almost certainly go her hopes of succeeding the increasingly unpopular Sir Keir as Labour leader, despite her popularity with the party’s activists.

When she arrived for Prime Minister’s Questions, just half an hour after her bombshell confession, the Labour high command placed a collective arm around her.

Sir Keir Starmer, who told MPs he was proud to sit alongside a deputy PM from a working-class background, put his hand on her left shoulder.

Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, sitting the other side of the beleaguered Ms Rayner, did the same on her right shoulder.

Rachel Reeves, who also knows all about being beleaguered and shedding tears in public, looked across at her and smiled sympathetically.

If Labour feared a brutal PMQs onslaught from Kemi Badenoch, they needn’t have worried. “Why is she still in office?” the Tory leader began. So far, so good.

“If he had a backbone he would sack her,” she said in the second of her six questions. But that was it. “But let us get back to borrowing,” she continued.

Inexplicably, the Tory leader ploughed on with her pre-prepared questions on government borrowing. Labour MPs couldn’t believe their luck. Cue numerous jokes about missed open goals.

After another dud Kemi-Kaze performance at PMQs, some MPs were even speculating that Ms Rayner’s survival prospects – slim, at best – remain better than those of the Tory leader.

But in the cruel world of social media, Ms Rayner was not spared a vicious onslaught from critics from across the political divide. You’d better keep your phone switched off, Angi.

From the spiky shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, Ms Rayner was “the property tax dodging, freeloading deputy prime minister” who had “finally admitted breaking the law and evading paying taxes owed”.

There was more. “She says that’s she’s sorry,” said punchy Priti. “But she’s only sorry that she was caught out. Rotten Rayner should go.”

Nadhim Zahawi, who was sacked as Tory chairman in 2023 after an inquiry found he failed to disclose an investigation into his tax affairs, added: “Did you think about my children Angela Rayner?

“Breaks my heart seeing anybody distressed about their children, but the hypocrisy really does hurt.”

But it wasn’t just Tories – who let’s not forget were denounced as “Scum!” by Ms Rayner back in 2021, in what she described as “street language” – who were brutal.

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The acerbic George Galloway declared: “She’s a lowlife”. For good measure, he claimed she was “on the make” and on “Supermarket Sweep, piling her trolley full”.

However, from the trade union movement, which campaigned hard for the DPM’s workers’ rights legislation, there was unequivocal support.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak told Sky News: “Angela Rayner comes under sustained coverage because she’s a working-class woman in a way that frankly Nigel Farage, leading members of the shadow cabinet, never would.

“I think there’s a real heavy dose of misogyny when it comes to Angela.

“I wouldn’t want to see a hounded out of an important role by right wing politicians and the right wing media who frankly can’t handle the fact that a working class woman is our Deputy Prime Minister.”

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But there was sympathy from one party leader, Sir Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats, who said that as a parent of a disabled child “I know the thing my wife and I worry most about is our son’s care after we have gone”.

Shortly after PMQs, opening a Tory debate on, yes, property taxes, shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride opted for ridicule and mockery. “I’m absolutely certain that the deputy prime minister had a good recess,” he began.

“We saw many photographs of her down at the seaside, just off the coast in a rubber dinghy, rather like many of the other photographs over the summer given the reckless policies this government has towards illegal migration.

“She was probably celebrating the acquisition of another property for her property empire, but perhaps also slightly tinged with that nagging doubt as to whether she had indeed paid enough stamp duty.

“Well, we’ll get to the bottom of that in due course.”

Quite so, Mel. We will.

Let’s also reflect that on Monday Sir Keir Starmer proudly announced: “Phase two of my government starts today.” On Tuesday, he informed MPs, he was “speaking at length” to Ms Rayner. Must have been awkward.

And on Wednesday, the PM had to watch her tearful confession, just minutes before facing MPs in the Commons.

Not a great start to phase two, prime minister. Nor for his embattled and tearful deputy, who’s now fighting for political survival.

Nigel Farage knows how to seize on a moment and how to spin a line.

He came to Washington to declare that Britain had “become North Korea.”

I’m not sure if he has been to North Korea, but I have, and I can report that Britain is not North Korea.

But then it makes a good headline and Mr Farage knows that. And to underline his point, he was gifted a moment with the news of the arrest of Graham Linehan two days ago at Heathrow.

But perhaps Mr Farage met his match over here on the other side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the political divide.

At a committee hearing in Washington – examining the perceived threat and impact that UK and EU online safety laws have on free speech – Mr Farage was given what liberals will likely regard as an evisceration by a number of Democratic Party politicians.

American politicians know how to drive a sound bite. One lawmaker called Mr Farage a “fringe politician”. Another, Representative Jamie Raskin, described Mr Farage’s appearance as “a drive by hit against a Democratic ally to benefit a Donald Trump sycophant and wannabe…”

Mr Raskin went on to address the British people. “To the people of the UK who think this Putin-loving, free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come on over to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom.”

There is a curiosity around this hearing. The right in Britain (Farage) and the left in America (Raskin et al) are using this moment to warn of what they both see as the erosion of freedom of speech in each other’s countries.

Frankly both are using the moment to score political points for their own side in their own countries – you’d expect nothing less.

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Interestingly though, when I put it to Mr Farage that there is more than a small dose of hypocrisy going on given that Trump’s administration has been accused of stifling any speech that it disagrees with (books in schools, content in museums, social media on phones, reporting in the media) he didn’t push back.

Instead he said he was here to warn against the stifling of any free speech; and to warn America of where he thinks it leads: “‘authoritarian Britain” in his mind.

Speaking to the committee, Mr Farage said: “I’ve come today as well to be a klaxon, to say to you, don’t allow piece by piece, this to happen here in America.

“And you would be doing us and yourselves and all freedom-loving people a favour if your politicians and your businesses said to the British government, ‘You’ve simply got this wrong, at what point did we become North Korea?'”