The New Statesman.

Angela Rainer has quit over her underpaid property tax.

Kirstalma is reshuffling his cabinet, and this quiet Friday in the first week of the new

parliamentary term has become a huge day for the Labour government.

I'm Rachel Cunleff, and this

is the New Statesman podcast. Later, we'll hear from Megan Kenyon and Tom McTagg, but first, I am joined by

our political editor, Andrew Maher. Andrew, Rayner has resigned from all three of her positions,

housing secretary, deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the

Labour Party. When the news of the stamp duty shortfall first broke earlier this week, you made

quite a convincing argument that she should stay. What's changed? Well, the argument I was making,

and which, by the way, I'm not embarrassed about it, was a political argument.

In other words, I thought it would be disastrous, very, very bad, at least, for Keir Stama

and for the government to lose Angela Rainer for a whole series of reasons that I then explained.

I think it is terrible for the government that she has gone.

But at the same time, if you remember, I said that the whole thing hinged on whether

Laurie Magnus, the independent reviewer on ministerial standards, concluded that she had been given

bad legal advice, which was not her fault, and there was nothing she could have done about that,

on the one hand, in which case she would have stayed,

or that she had somehow failed to ask enough questions or give enough information to get the legal advice that came back, which is broadly speaking what he said. And so in a sense,

he has given a verdict we thought was possible. Once that verdict was given, which is that

she had not lived up to the higher standards

of ministerial responsibility, she absolutely had to go because this government has gone on

...