The hounding of Angela Rayner is outrageous: brutal, snobbish and completely out of proportion to any mistake she may (or may not) have made. The sums are tiny and the issue itself — the deeming of a property as a main residence for capital gains tax purposes — has always been a matter of public confusion. I for one have discovered from the recent press reports that my own understanding was pretty cloudy.
As for the issue of the electoral register, the underlying purpose of the law here is to prevent voter fraud, and nobody is accusing Rayner of that. Every now and again we do just seem to lose our heads: in my book Great Parliamentary Scandals I devoted an extended chapter to a
