I went past parliament last week and saw Angela Rayner. She is one of those politicians you couldn’t miss anyway, but she was also dressed in primary colours and silver shoes, the purest “up yours” outfit imaginable.
It was a couple of hours after a toe-curling exchange on Sky News in which the Conservative MP James Daly, who reported Rayner to Greater Manchester police, was asked by two anchors and Labour’s Chris Bryant what his allegations were. “You wrote to the police,” said Beth Rigby, her voice a delicious cocktail of bafflement and tenacity. “So what did you ask them? Why won’t you say? It’s weird.” “I asked the police to investigate certain matters that were in the public domain,” Daly replied. Who knows why he was so cagey? I suspect it was because, said out loud, it would sound petty and mischievous.
This is a common play on the right. Many rumours about politicians emanate from Biteback, the publishing house owned by the former Tory deputy chairman Michael Ashcroft. It is considered unseemly to try to join the dots between one hit job and the next. Give the guy a break: it’s not like he writes this stuff himself. He’s just an innocent billionaire, bankrolling a bunch of completely unconnected questions.
Labour scandals are never comparable to Tory ones: Rayner will not be fined millions of pounds by HMRC (unlike Nadhim Zahawi); I can say with certainty that she has never been, nor ever will be, married to anyone claiming non-dom status (unlike the prime minister); she has never used a pandemic to give a huge public contract to a mate, nor been fined by police. But it is considered unhelpful to point out these non-parallels, since Labour politicians have to be cleaner than clean. Being cleaner than the Conservatives is too low a bar.
It will always be win-win for a billionaire. There will be no consequences for Ashcroft if Rayner turns out to be innocent of everything. Indeed, the more boring the outcome, the better, since most people won’t remember it – they will just remember that something a bit dodgy happened, and isn’t that just the way with politics? Full of those dodgy people.
It is an incredibly simple, obvious, cynical manoeuvre – and it won’t stop working until we all, silver shoes optional, say: “Up yours.”
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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