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.

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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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.

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.

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.

Angela Rayner has given a lengthy explanation as to why she underpaid stamp duty on the purchase of her second home, but there are still unanswered questions.

The deputy prime minister has claimed she made an honest mistake as lawyers initially advised her she only owed the basic rate of stamp duty when she bought a flat in Hove in May.

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She said it was a “complex” situation, as she had sold her stake in her family home in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, to a trust that was set up to provide for her teenage son, who has lifelong disabilities.

This meant she did not technically own the home in Greater Manchester when she purchased the one in East Sussex – but subsequent legal advice said the second home surcharge still applied.

What did Rayner tell her lawyers?

While Ms Rayner has made all these details public, “the crucial question is what she told her conveyancer when she purchased the Hove flat and what advice they gave her based on what she told them”, Patrick Cannon, a tax barrister at Cannon Chambers told Sky News.

“They may have given her wrong advice but she may not have given the full story.”

As set out on the government’s website, if a trust is set up for a child under 18 – as Ms Rayner’s son is – the parent is treated as still owning that dwelling for the purposes of stamp duty. There is an exception if a trustee buys a house for a child under the Mental Capacity Act, but that does not appear to be the case here given the higher tax is owed.

Mr Cannon said that to a tax adviser this is a “readily understandable area of the law” but there are “many solicitors and property lawyers who would not have picked up on this provision”.

Often conveyancers will tell their client not to rely on their tax advice but that might depend upon what they know in the first place – and in this case the trust.

As Thomas Wallace, director of the WTT tax group, said: “For correct advice to be given around any potential liability the full facts must be disclosed to the adviser, and this is particularly important where a person’s affairs are complex such as having an involvement with trusts.”

Who did Ms Rayner get her advice from?

The cabinet minister has not named who she initially consulted and they can’t speak out because of client confidentiality.

Sky News understands she initially consulted three people before buying the Hove flat – one individual experienced in conveyancing and two experts on the law around trusts.

However, it is not clear if they were experts in tax law.

In a thread on X, tax expert Dan Neidle wrote that if Ms Rayner did not consult the right lawyers then it could be considered carelessness on her part.

But he said it could also be the fault of the lawyers for advising outside their expertise, if they are not a stamp duty specialist.

When will the ethics investigation conclude?

Whether Ms Rayner’s story stands up to scrutiny will ultimately be decided by the prime minister’s independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus, who is investigating whether a breach of standards took place.

It is not clear how long the probe will last, or what will happen if she has found to have broken the rules.

Sir Keir Starmer has been quick to fire ministers caught up in wrongdoing but it would be a huge blow to his operation to lose someone so senior. Ms Rayner, who is also the housing secretary, is incredibly popular with the Labour membership and was elected by them to be deputy leader of the party.

This means that while she could be sacked as housing secretary and deputy prime minister she would remain deputy party leader unless she chose to step down – triggering a deputy leadership election.

That would be very damaging to Labour after only one year in office and would also question Sir Keir’s judgement – as he has spent days defending Ms Rayner on the airwaves.

What did the PM know and when?

There are questions over what Downing Street knew and when as up until Monday they were insisting the deputy PM had done nothing wrong. Sir Keir even went on the radio to call Ms Rayner a “great British success story” and condemn “briefings against her” as a “mistake”.

In her statement on Wednesday, Ms Rayner did not say when she realised she had paid the incorrect amount of tax, only that she sought expert counsel opinion following media scrutiny and then applied to have a court order lifted which prevented her from speaking about the trust.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said on Thursday morning that the “definitive advice” on Ms Rayner’s stamp duty arrangements came in on Wednesday morning, but earlier Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said follow-up advice “came back on Monday”.

Will Rayner be fined?

Even if Ms Rayner survives the ethics investigation, she may not be fully out of the woods. As independent stamp duty expert Sean Randall points out, she could still face a penalty from HMRC. This could be as much as 100% of the tax she owes – reportedly £40,000 – though this is usually negotiated down to 30-40%, according to Mr Randall.

A penalty from HMRC means carelessness rather than dishonesty, but Ms Rayner might find this hard to survive, given she lambasted her Tory opponents for similar mistakes (such as the case with former Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi).

Mr Randall said that relying on tax advice “is not enough to avoid a penalty” and the deputy prime minister will have to show that she took reasonable steps to get the correct advice and provided all the relevant information to her lawyers.

Do our tax laws need to be changed?

If Ms Rayner is cleared of any rule breaches, it could spark a debate about our tax laws. If they are so complicated that the second most senior person in government can’t understand them, and lawyers get them wrong, does stamp duty need to be changed?

For Mr Cannon and Mr Randall, it was a resounding “yes”. But Mr Randall added: “That question has been around for as long as I have. The stamp duty code is crazy complicated.”

An investigation has been launched after security guards foiled a plot to embarrass the prime minister by playing “sex noises” from a phone hidden in the Commons.

Parliamentary staff carrying out a routine sweep of the chamber ahead of PMQs uncovered the mobile phone, which had been taped to the underside of the Commons table, Sky News understands.

It appears that the device had been set to play a sexually explicit recording if rung, and that the person behind the plot hoped to make this happen as Sir Keir Starmer faced off against Kemi Badenoch on Wednesday lunchtime.

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But, a Commons source has told Sky News, that parliamentary security guards found the device before it could go off.

The source explained that the phone had been attached to the underside of the table, near the front bench, with double-sided sticky tape, and that this had lost its grip, leading to the phone lying exposed on the floor.

The phone later rang twice during PMQs with a “sex noise” ringtone, but it had already been removed from the chamber.

However, while the plot – believed to be a prank – was avoided, security staff do not know who was behind it or how the phone came to be there.

It is being treated as a serious security breach, and it is understood that there is no clear footage of the phone being planted.

Hundreds of parliamentary security staff were on strike over pay and conditions on Wednesday morning, meaning visitors were banned from the parliamentary estate.

It is not the first time there have been breaches of parliamentary security in recent years. A group of semi-naked men and women glued themselves to the glass of the public gallery in the Commons in 2019, to protest about climate change. A dozen people were subsequently arrested.

Responding to a request for comment, a parliamentary spokesperson said: “The safety and security of all those who work in Parliament is our top priority, however we cannot comment on specific security measures.”