PAUL BRACCHI: Why does Angela Rayner STILL have two taxpayer-funded bodyguards – 5 months after she was compelled out in shame?

Angela Rayner was asked in a TV interview, when she was deputy PM, if she would ever want the top job.

‘Not a chance,’ she replied with a smile. ‘It would age me by ten years within six months.’

It’s a good line. But her answer, even if sincere at the time, looks more implausible by the day.

The bad news for No 10 is that, buoyed by the sea air, stiff country hikes and hearty breakfasts at her local cafe in her adopted home on the Sussex coast – where she is being treated in some of the style to which she was accustomed in office – Rayner looks in rude health. No sign of accelerated ageing yet.

That ‘style’, incidentally, including a chauffeur-driven car and bodyguards, is still being underwritten by the taxpayer (we’ll come back to that).

Until this week – when she led the backbench revolt over the Mandelson scandal in funereal purple, not her customary postbox red – she has remained loyal to Keir Starmer, at least in public.

Her dramatic intervention in the debate over the appointment of the disgraced peer as US ambassador was applauded, but the current occupant of No 10 probably didn’t see it that way.

It prompted one commentator to ponder whether her boss might have been muttering ‘et tu, Angela’ under his breath – a reference to Brutus’s betrayal of Julius Caesar.

He would have been more than justified in doing so. For Rayner’s Left-wing coup appears already to be under way.

Last weekend, The Mail on Sunday revealed that Rayner has amassed a £1million war chest to fund her bid to succeed Starmer and, according to sources, has already started promising Cabinet positions to her supporters.

Rayner has form, after all, like many of the Machiavellian characters who inhabit Westminster, for saying one thing and doing precisely the other.

She has criticised politicians’ outside earnings but is now signed up to a leading speaking agency herself.

She repeatedly condemned ‘Tory sleaze’ but was forced to resign in September for breaking the ministerial code over the underpayment of stamp duty on her £800,000 apartment in Hove, earning her the nickname ‘Three Pads Rayner’.

She appeared, metaphorically speaking, to be dead and buried.

Could she have undergone a more dramatic reversal of fortune in such a short space of time?

Both politically and financially she is perhaps in a stronger position now than before she tearfully quit in the autumn.

Since then, Rayner has split her time between her constituency in Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, where she shares a home with her ex-husband and where her two teenage boys live, and Hove at the weekends, where she has a grand first floor flat near the beach and where her boyfriend, lobbyist Sam Tarry, 43, has a house near his ex-wife and two children.

The couple have become a familiar sight in the area’s wine bars and shops. They have even been seen dancing together more than once. ‘I thought she was practising for Strictly,’ reveals one amused local.

A favourite haunt is Richard’s Cafe, sometimes followed by walks in popular Queen’s Park or on the sprawling South Downs.

Most recently, the pair could be seen strolling hand-in-hand on a trail near Brighton racecourse in a photograph which was splashed across the papers last weekend.

But one thing went unreported – along with the revealing story behind it. Shadowing the couple was a woman. All you could see of her was her forehead and long hair, but there can be little doubt, however, that she was one of Rayner’s two personal bodyguards, who have been ferrying her around in a luxury BMW SUV.

Five months on from her resignation then, she still has a taxpayer-funded security detail as she did when she was deputy PM and Secretary of State for Housing.

The female close protection officer, who she retained from those days, and her male colleague are understood to work for a private firm paid for from a fund administered by Parliamentary authorities. Such a team, according to a source in this field, typically costs around £3,000 a day.

The bill could have already cost the public purse up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. ‘They follow her everywhere,’ said a local.

You would hope there is a good reason for the expense.

To date, however, the only explanation given is graffiti calling Rayner a ‘tax evader’ and ‘b****’, daubed on a wall outside the Hove property shortly after her tax affairs were exposed. The words were removed and have not reappeared there or, to the best of our knowledge, anywhere else.

Few surely will think that the graffiti, if that is the extent of the threat, justifies such a high level of security. Rayner is among only three MPs to be given this kind of security. Another is believed to be Jess Phillips, who received death threats following a social media tirade from Elon Musk in the wake of the Government’s initial decision to reject a national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Rayner was asked for comment in an email to her parliamentary office which went unanswered.

When queried about her security arrangements in October, after Tarry was seen being ferried around in the same BMW, a spokesman for her said: ‘Angela has a heightened and active security risk, and her property in Hove has been attacked with misogynistic and extremist graffiti.’

The investigation by HMRC over Rayner’s stamp duty furore has not been completed and she will certainly have to pay back the £40,000 she owes.

But any criticism is likely to be muted, according to Dan Neidle, of the Tax Policy Associates think tank, and at worst attributed to ‘carelessness’, not malfeasance.

Which is one of the reasons why Rayner is being openly discussed as a replacement for Starmer.

Any fine from HMRC, given those circumstances, is likely to be small and more than offset by her £17,000 severance payment, a lucrative advance from her planned memoir and her earnings as a public speaker.

So how much can Rayner expect to earn from her new ‘after dinner circuit’ job? Well, Jeremy Hunt has declared more than £260,000 in earnings for 21 speeches since signing up in October 2024, an average of £12,500 a pop.

Much will depend on whether Rayner’s boss manages to survive – and whether it is she who is crowned his successor.

As The Mail on Sunday’s political editor Glen Owen reported yesterday, her allies have been briefing that she is not an ‘adornment’ to any other contender – a signal to her chief rival, Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

She’s said to have been plotting her coup over lunches with allies in the Commons tea room, and also over dinner with PR svengali Matthew Freud.

A pivotal role in the unfolding political drama will be Rayner’s relationship with Sam Tarry, the former MP for Ilford South who was part of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership team and who now works as a public affairs consultant.

Their relationship came to light in classic ‘red top’ style in 2020 when Tarry was pictured leaving Rayner’s rented pied-a-terre in London with untied shoelaces and what appeared to be a toothbrush in his top pocket.

In July 2022, Tarry was sacked as shadow transport minister for giving an unauthorised TV interview from the picket line during a rail strike. And it was Streeting, a Labour moderate and critic of the Corbynistas, who was instrumental in the sacking.

What did Tarry’s girlfriend think about that? She said she would rather ‘stick pins in her eyes’ than support Streeting, according to The Times’s State Of It podcast.

The million-dollar question though is: How long before the Red Queen sticks the dagger into Starmer?