Sic transit gloria Angela

Angela Rayner’s downfall did not arrive in the blaze of oratory she might have imagined, nor in the thunder of the Tory benches she once relished skewering. No, it came courtesy of that most British of assassins: paperwork. Not a sword, not a scandal of the flesh, but the dreary, beige villainy of stamp duty. To fall on the battlefield of bureaucracy is both humiliating and quintessentially Westminster.

For years, Rayner cultivated her persona as Labour’s street-fighting deputy. The hair, the accent, the anecdotes about leaving school at 16, pregnant and broke — she was the anti-Etonian antidote to Keir Starmer’s courtroom polish. Where he was silk, she was steel-toe boots. Where he quoted case law, she threw political punches. It was a double act that seemed, improbably, to work.

But then came the revelation: she had underpaid roughly £40,000 in stamp duty on a property deal. Suddenly, the woman who cast herself as a tribune of the working class found herself hoist by her own fiscal petard. Her insistence that she had done nothing wrong slowly melted into that fatal phrase: “I should have sought specialist advice.” Westminster-speak for “I’m cooked.”

The comedy is almost Shakespearean. The deputy prime minister felled not by hubris or betrayal, but by HMRC’s equivalent of a parking ticket. Unionists of yesteryear could survive affairs, expenses scandals, even the occasional dodgy donor. But stamp duty? That’s the sort of thing middle England understands. It hurts, it bores, and it cannot be spun.

Her resignation letter was drenched in contrition, but also in irony. Here was a woman who had spent years reminding voters of her rough start in life, now undone by a very middle-class problem: misfiling the bill on a house. The tabloids barely needed to sharpen their knives — she had handed them the blade, neatly wrapped in conveyancing forms.

And yet, her downfall may prove temporary. Rayner’s strength has always been that she looks and sounds nothing like the typical politician. Voters forgive rough edges; they even forgive the odd hypocrisy. What they don’t forgive is arrogance — and by resigning, she may have sidestepped that particular charge.

Still, the spectacle is irresistible. The streetfighter of Stockport, the scourge of Tories, finally defeated — not by Johnson or Sunak or even Starmer, but by the most feared figure in Britain: the taxman.