There are few things better appreciated by a politician under fire than “legal advice”. Not only does the claim that you acted on legal advice appear to rebuke your critics, but often you are also forbidden, or allegedly forbidden, from saying what the advice even was.

But it gets a little bit dicier if your claim is that the legal advice you received was wrong, or, even worse, that it was advice the lawyer in question wasn’t actually licensed to give. Law and accountancy are both very tightly regulated professions, and allegations of that sort can shut businesses and end careers.

It is therefore little surprise that Verrico & Associates, the conveyancing firm which advised Angela Rayner on the purchase of the most recent addition to her property empire — a flat in Hove upon which she appears to have dodged £40,000 in tax — has come out swinging.

Its argument is simple: as a conveyancing firm, it is not licensed or qualified to offer tax advice. What it can do, and what it claims it did, is put information provided by Rayner into HMRC’s online stamp duty calculator and tell her the number it spits out. That is not advice it is “using a computer for someone”. Verrico & Associates has no incentive to back down; as the Daily Telegraph reports, it has to offer an explanation to the regulator anyway. Rayner needs to prove that the firm offered unofficial tax advice — by nature very difficult to do.

One has to sympathise with Keir Starmer here. Thanks to Labour’s questionable practice of having a directly-elected deputy leader, Rayner has her own mandate and he can’t simply be rid of her. Nonetheless, his decision to row so hard behind her is now looking a little reckless.

It would also have been easy for him to reserve judgement until Sir Laurie Magnus, the Government ethics adviser, had concluded his report. Starmer has previously made great play of his deference to such formal procedures; this was a perfect time to continue that. Instead, the Prime Minister has voluntarily made Rayner’s problems his problems.

We don’t yet know the full details of this latest case and it may well be that the Housing Secretary made a sincere mistake. The problem is that in politics, mere legality is not the whole story.

Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney Rushanara Ali was perfectly entitled, by law, to turf out her tenants and hike the rent on a building she owned. But it was still a politically fatal thing for a homelessness minister in a government committed to abolishing so-called “no fault evictions” to do.

Likewise, Rayner is now Housing Secretary — and a self-styled champion of the working class, to boot — with a deeply unflattering pattern of stories about the tax arrangements on her property empire. First, there was Lord Ashcroft’s allegation that she misdeclared her primary residence to avoid council tax; now, the allegation that she has done so again to avoid stamp duty.

Even if no deliberate wrongdoing is proven, the optics are terrible. What is somebody who once claimed that “tax avoidance costs lives” doing receiving (or pretending to have received) high-end tax advice anyway?

And if she did avoid paying £40,000 then how many people, by her own reckoning, does she think that killed?

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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