The right-wing press had been out to get her for ages.

It therefore came as little surprise that a concerted media campaign – spearheaded by the ultra-conservative Telegraph newspaper – eventually forced the resignation of the UK's Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Yet Angela Rayner had not, most reasonable voices agreed, acted with intentional dishonesty when she paid the wrong rate of property tax on the purchase of her new home.

But, according to Downing Street's own ethics adviser, she had failed in her ministerial duty to seek the most robust, rigorous and expert advice.

Following a difficult divorce, and having ceded the family home to her former husband, the then Deputy PM had needed to secure a property suited to the needs of her disabled son, and, in doing so, had paid what appears have been (and which she has now accepted was) an incorrect amount of stamp duty, based on the advice of a local lawyer – who was not, it turns out, an expert authority in this complex area of law.

Unlike the former Conservative Chancellor who was alleged to have failed to declare millions during his tenure at the Treasury, or the former Conservative Prime Minister whose wife eventually gave up her non-domiciled status to pay tens of millions to the Exchequer, Ms. Rayner's sin of omission might seem relatively minor – but was deemed unforgiveable by those Tory papers insofar as her ministerial portfolio had included the housing brief.

There are those who have compared her case to the Reform UK leader's recent admission that he had not (as previously claimed) bought a house in his own parliamentary constituency (a claim he had made in response to complaints that he never spent any of his time there) but that the property had instead been put in his partner's name.

There are some who have suggested that the truly wealthy – as Nigel Farage's friend Donald Trump likes to boast – end up paying the very least tax, because they can afford the most expensive lawyers and accountants, who can make sure they return to the revenue the most minimal sums possible, if indeed anything at all.

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There are even those who have supposed that the right-wing press had targeted the most left-wing senior member of Sir Keir Starmer's Cabinet not only because of her outspoken politics, but because she happened to be a plain-spoken working-class woman – a northern trade-unionist born into poverty in industrial Manchester – who wouldn't know how to attempt the kind of cunning financial wizardry familiar to her Tory peers with backgrounds in business capital, but who would nevertheless dare to buy for herself and her family a nice apartment in an ideal location on England's much-sought-after south coast.

They don't want any of her kind there.

The departure of Angela Rayner left two vacuums at the top of British politics, one of which the Prime Minister was ruthlessly swift to fill (or, indeed, to exploit). As part of a ministerial reshuffle so fast it almost looked like it had been planned in advance, Keir Starmer moved the affable and vaguely competent Foreign Secretary – the only person on the planet known to have developed a decent working relationship (despite their extreme ideological differences) with the current American Vice-President – into Rayner's old role… a major demotion in all but name. (The job of Deputy Prime Minister is nowhere near as important as it might sound.)

Mr. Starmer was then able to move a relatively right-wing Home Secretary into the Foreign Office, and to replace her with an even more hawkish Home Secretary, one whose policies might even appeal to supporters of Reform UK – if it weren't for the fact of her evident intellectual abilities and her family's Pakistani heritage.

Of course, despite all the grand Westminster theatricality of it all, this will do little to placate those whose greatest goals in life are to stop small boats bringing desperate asylum-seekers across the English Channel, to demonstrate their devotion to their macho nationalist heroes (the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage), to stick it to the smug elitism of the liberal consensus, and to down endless pints of warm cut-price beer in the local branches of their favourite faceless chain of Brexit-loving public houses.

As the left-wing parliamentarian Bell Robeiro-Addy – the first candidate to throw her hat into the ring for the party’s deputy leadership – this month warned, Mr. Starmer's administration would be wise to give up on the impossible task it seems to have set itself, the project of trying to "out-Reform Reform".

More mainstream candidates have also, of course, since put their names forward for the contest, whose final result is due to be announced towards the end of October.

One of those candidates had, eleven years ago, been forced to quit her frontbench role after tweeting a photograph of a white van parked in the drive of a house festooned with flags of St George, an image which was thought at the time to have been posted in an attempt to ridicule working-class nationalism – prompting the Conservative premier at the time to say that this showed how her party liked to “sneer” at people “who love their country”.

Whether that party now chooses to strive to retain its soul – and thereby signal an unashamed readiness to take the fight straight to the forces of the radical nationalism – or to continue to try to mirror those forces by dragging itself towards the Far Right in a competition it can never (and should never) hope to win, may well determine the future not only of the UK's struggling Labour movement but also of the United Kingdom itself.