Labour weren’t helping Rayner by shredding documents
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Angela Rayner is not being well served by her own party.
There is undoubtedly a great deal of sympathy out there in the country for the beleaguered deputy leader of the Labour Party, now being investigated by the police after numerous complaints over the sale of her ex-council house and the question as to her exact address at the time she stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate. And much of the criticism she has received certainly looks – to me at least – as spiteful and vexatious, motivated more by political opportunism than by any genuine concern over alleged law-breaking.
But then an email arrived from the Labour-supporting website, LabourList, with the headline: “Not another one!” This was in reference to Conservative MP Mark Menzies, who has already lost his party’s whip after allegations of some truly bizarre night-time shenanigans involving his 78-year-old constituency aide and a request by the MP to her for a few thousand quid to help him out of some undefined trouble.
LabourList gleefully informs me that Labour Party chair, Anneliese Dodds, has written to Lancashire Police calling for an investigation into Mr Menzies. Again, it seems to me that Ms Dodds’s concern is not so much that justice must be done, but that the case of Menzies may soon disappear from public sight, and with an election on the way that would not do at all.
Readers will recall the enthusiasm with which Labour MPs pursued Boris Johnson when he was accused of illegal cake-eating in Downing Street – there was certainly no “innocent until proven guilty” about the rhetoric used then.
Most observers might perceive just a shade of double standards here. I do not believe that the complaints against Rayner are justified, although I’m prepared to be proved wrong. I think her forced resignation as deputy – a course of action she has promised to pursue if she is found guilty – would be unfair and deeply regrettable, not just for her but for the country.
Labour didn’t help Rayner by destroying documents that could have revealed the truth about her claims as to where she lived ten years ago. Didn’t the party ask itself how it would look to the outside world that these documents were no longer available for scrutiny? A Labour spokesman said it was carried out in line with “data protection laws”.
The tendency to draw the police into political arguments is a tiresome and self-destructive one that both sides indulge in at their peril. One of the many ironies of such a practice is that all parties regularly criticise the lack of officers and resources available to the police to investigate the kind of crimes that voters are most concerned about, including assault, burglaries and vandalism. Yet they think nothing of wanting officers to spend hours, even weeks, combing over MPs’ private lives in the hope that they will deliver a “Gotcha!” moment for one side or the other.
If Rayner is forced out of office, she would become a victim of a reprehensible, modern political fashion for upping the ante of criticism to an absurd level. We should be able to expect our politicians to be intelligent enough to tackle political opponents in an astute, intelligent way, ideally without having to call the police in every time someone is accused of wrong-doing.
It would be far healthier, less expensive and more conducive to the public political debate if politicians’ first instinct when seeing an opponent do something wrong was not to dial 999.
