The rise and fall of Angela Rayner: from council estate to the halls of power

Evening Standard

Angela Rayner’s career took her from being a teenage mother in a council estate in Stockport to Deputy Prime Minister.The politician resigned from her posts on Friday 5 September over her failure to pay the correct amount of stamp duty on a flat by the sea.

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00:00From a working-class background to being voted one of the most powerful figures in left-wing

00:04politics to the unravelling of her career, Angela Rayner's political journey has been one of the

00:09most striking in modern politics. Born in Stockport in 1980, Rayner grew up in poverty on a council

00:15estate with her grandma working three jobs to keep the family afloat. If you grow up in poverty

00:21and on a run-down estate, it doesn't take much for you to feel held back. She then left school

00:27at 16 with no qualifications and pregnant with her first child. When I was 16 and I was pregnant,

00:34the shame and the humiliation that people made me feel like, you know, institutions of government,

00:40you know, doctors, police, they were there above you and they were there to do things and you had

00:45to keep order. They weren't people like you. Rayner started working as a carer for Stockport

00:50Council and her first involvement in politics was as a trade union rep for Unison, where she met

00:55her now ex-husband Mark Rayner. She was then selected as a Labour Party prospective parliamentary

01:01candidate for Ashton under Lynn in 2014 and from here she quickly climbed the ranks. In 2015 she

01:08was elected as an MP and from 2016 she held shadow minister roles before becoming deputy leader in 2020.

01:15After Labour's landslide victory in 2024, Rayner found herself deputy prime minister and housing secretary.

01:21Rayner embodied the Labour dream, a working class woman breaking barriers at the top of politics.

01:28Her style came with praise and criticism as supporters commended her for her authenticity

01:33while critics targeted her working class language in the Commons. However, when it comes to purchasing

01:38property, Rayner has faced questions about dodging tax. Firstly in 2024, when she said if a police probe

01:45found she had dodged capital gains tax when she bought her former council house, she would resign.

01:50However, on the 5th of September 2025, the former deputy prime minister resigned from government

01:56after referring herself to Keir Starmer's Independent Advisor on Ministerial Standards,

02:01who concluded she had breached her ministerial code over her underpayment of stamp duty on a property in Hove.

02:08I took and melaid on. That advice and that advice was wrong and now you are. So the accusations that

02:14you didn't pay enough stamp duty on Hove, they're actually accurate, you didn't. They are accurate.

02:20In a letter to the prime minister, she said she deeply regrets her decision to not seek

02:24additional specialist tax advice and takes full responsibility for this error.

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