If Angela Rayner had to go, why should Rachel Reeves stay?

It looks as if the accident-prone Rachel Reeves has got away with it this time, but how many more ‘inadvertent mistakes’ can she make, asks John Rentoul – and if she can’t be trusted to keep her own house in order, why should she be trusted with the economy?

Rachel Reeves is lucky that not many people know about letting licences. Most people on the other hand know about stamp duty. So it is not just the difference in the amounts of money involved that mean the chancellor has been let off with a reprimand when Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, lost her job.

The argument that the chancellor’s supporters will make is that she would have saved £945, the cost of the licence, if the matter had not been “brought to my attention” by journalists, whereas Rayner would have saved £40,000. That, of course, does not account for any rent from the property that the chancellor might have had to hand back.

Even so, Reeves is fortunate that Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, decided that “further investigation is not necessary”. It might be thought that the question of whether the chancellor has committed a criminal offence might require more scrutiny than a presumably brief conversation between Magnus and Keir Starmer.

‘The prime minister may have succeeded in saving his chancellor this time, but she may not always be so lucky. She has been accident-prone for some time’ (PA Wire)

I do not think that Reeves’s mistake is a sacking offence, although it does not reflect well on her attention to detail that she failed to check whether a licence was needed to let out her former family home in south London.

As the Conservatives point out, she even supported a similar licensing scheme in her Leeds constituency two years ago, saying: “This scheme means private landlords in the area will be required by law to obtain a licence for any residential property they are seeking to let and must meet certain standards to ensure the property is safe.”

But if she stays, why did Rayner have to go? Rayner made an “inadvertent mistake” and is repaying the money owed. What is the difference in principle between the two cases?

Ultimately, the suspicion lingers that Starmer was inspired by Arthur Clough’s poem: “Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive / Officiously to keep alive.” The prime minister did not strive officiously to keep Rayner’s career alive, whereas he is desperate to keep Reeves, an ally who is no threat to his own position, in post.

It was a form of poetic justice, therefore, that Rayner was replaced as deputy Labour leader by Lucy Powell, who is likely to be more of a nuisance to Starmer than Rayner ever was.

The prime minister may have succeeded in saving his chancellor this time, but she may not always be so lucky. She has been accident-prone for some time. The plagiarism row over her book on female economists suggested that she had not read her own book, let alone written it. The changes made to her online CV after her claim to have worked as an economist at HBOS was challenged were embarrassing.

She accepted gifts of clothes from Waheed Alli, the Labour donor and fixer, and Sabrina Carpenter tickets at the O2, in effect admitting an error of judgement afterwards by saying that she wouldn’t do it again. “I felt I was doing the right thing but I do understand perceptions,” she said about the tickets for her and “a family member”.

Of course, Starmer himself was guilty of the same errors of judgement in accepting gifts, but in Reeves’s case they were made in addition to the lack of attention to detail.

The precariousness of her position ought to worry those who care about the soundness of the nation’s finances. Reeves has been guilty of “inadvertent mistakes” of political judgement, such as the cut in pensioners’ winter fuel payments, but most of the time she has been a bulwark against many of the worst instincts of the Labour Party, which are opposed to wealth creators, wealth creation and aspiration.

If she fell, she would probably be replaced by Wes Streeting or Darren Jones, both of whom are of a similar stripe in internal Labour politics, but her departure would weaken the pro-growth wing of the party.

She, the Labour government and the country cannot afford any more slip-ups.