If Rayner had to go, why should Reeves keep her job?

Rachel Reeves is lucky that not many people know about letting licences. Most people on the other hand know about stamp duty.

- JOHN RENTOUL

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.

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.