LONDON — While MPs in Britain’s Labour Party were trooping to its windswept conference in September, six of Angela Rayner’s closest aides were renting a villa together in Crete.

Their boss had just quit as deputy prime minister over a tax scandal, prompting a reset of Keir Starmer’s Downing Street. Yet as they scrolled social media on their sun loungers, Rayner’s allies saw the party faithful in Liverpool calling for her return.

One of the aides even took a call on the Greek island from reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!” (Rayner rejected the offer to avoid harming a return to frontline politics.)

The Rayner exile was short-lived. Four and a half months later, she is again wielding serious power in Westminster while Starmer’s premiership faces fresh turmoil. The 45-year-old former trade union organizer has become a focal point of the party’s “soft left,” a loose grouping of MPs who believe the party should swing away from centrism. She’s been brokering compromises with No. 10 on grassroots issues such as employees’ and leaseholders’ rights.

Her supporters now widely believe Rayner is likely to run for the leadership — which would make her Britain’s next prime minister, and first woman from Labour to do the job — if Starmer falls.

Chance has been on her side. Prominent figures from Rayner’s tribe within Labour appear to be ruled out; Energy Secretary Ed Miliband (a former party leader) has repeatedly insisted he will not run again, while Starmer blocked Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from running as an MP, stopping him from getting into the leadership stakes altogether.

Yet Rayner’s entire future — indeed, whether she can run at all — hinges on another game of chance.

An investigation by Britain’s tax authority over the scandal that prompted her resignation remains ominously incomplete. Several allies believe she cannot run until it is finished.

POLITICO spoke to 17 MPs, ministers and allies of Rayner, granted anonymity to speak frankly, about her carefully-planned return to the front lines — and how it could all be scuppered over the timing of a tax bill.

Even if it clears her, Rayner will be haunted by September’s findings from Britain’s ministerial ethics advisor, Laurie Magnus, who said her behavior failed the “highest possible standards of proper conduct” for a minister. That means Britain could find itself with a prime minister still fresh from scandal — even though a different scandal, the friendship between former U.S. Ambassador Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, appears to be hastening the demise of the current one.

Tax shadow looms over everything

Somewhere in the sprawling network of offices for HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Britain’s tax authority, investigators are mulling a decision that will ripple far beyond their remit.

Rayner stepped down as the PM’s second in command in September after failing to pay the correct amount of tax on the purchase of a second home. She paid the lower rate after advice from her lawyers, but failed to heed their warning that she should consult a tax expert. When she did ask — after journalists investigated — the expert concluded she should have paid the higher rate.

Rayner insists it was an honest mistake and that her first home had been in trust for her disabled son, but HMRC is now investigating whether she failed to take “reasonable care.” It would likely add a fine to her outstanding tax bill if so.

Until the decision, Rayner is in limbo. 

She has not yet paid HMRC because she does not know how much she will owe. There has been to and fro with HMRC asking follow-up questions and no end date is known, one person with knowledge of her thinking said.

She has given no media interviews since soon after the scandal broke and hopes not to until it is resolved, the person added.

“There’s a recognition that while the HMRC stuff is outstanding, it’s difficult to see how she can run,” said one MP allied to her. “That would stop her, I think,” said a separate long-time ally.

Yet a contest may not wait for her. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who represents the more right-leaning Blairite wing of the party, has made no secret of his ambition to run, and Starmer faces a difficult by-election on Feb. 26.

Rayner is already saving up to pay HMRC, planning a small number of after-dinner speeches which will boost her private income.

She has chosen a ghost writer for her memoir, which is due in the second half of 2026, and begun work on it. Her allies accept that the publication timeline is likely to drift if she returns to the front bench — just as a book on William Shakespeare by Tory former PM Boris Johnson was delayed far beyond its original deadline.

Rayner has also set up the Office of Angela Rayner Limited with her long-serving aide Nick Parrott, to handle staffing and support for her activities as a high-profile figure.

Allies believe the public will have some sympathy for Rayner over the circumstances of her resignation, as her ambition had been to keep her son out of the public eye. A second MP allied to Rayner said her team “don’t seem at all fazed or panicked” by what HMRC will uncover. “The mood is that they need HMRC to expedite this so that she can pay what she owes and put it behind her,” they said.

But trying to move before HMRC makes a decision would be nightmarish. One government official said: “Angela would get 80 MPs [needed for a nomination] easily but she just couldn’t do it with the HMRC thing hanging over her.”

The long-time ally quoted above said: “Why are HMRC taking so long to do it? It’s easy to get into conspiracy theories, isn’t it?”

Even if she is cleared by HMRC, it would put Downing Street’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, Laurie Magnus, in an awkward position. He ruled that Rayner had breached the ministerial code in September and he remains in post until December 2027. Magnus would be answerable to whoever is prime minister.

“If she was elected with a clear majority of Labour MPs, I wouldn’t have thought the advisor would rush into difficult, sensitive territory,” said Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. 

But Graham added: “He would have a discussion — ‘first of all, do you want me to stay in office, or do you want to appoint your own person?’ And then he might say, ‘well, there is the outstanding issue of my previous decision about your behavior.’ I don’t know quite where that conversation might lead to.”

A Cabinet minister added: “People come back from scandal and think they’re invincible. They’re really not.”

‘She’s never really been away’

Despite all this, Rayner is already back at the heart of the action in Westminster.

She had a few weeks of silence until her resignation speech in October, when she promised to continue bringing “determination, commitment and my socialist values” to parliament.

Since then Rayner has effectively acted as a shop steward for Labour’s back benchers, winning concessions from No. 10 on leasehold reforms and workers’ rights, and helping secure a role for parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee to examine the release of messages to and from Mandelson. Her allies also let it be known that she had voiced concerns about Starmer’s planned cuts to jury trials.

A second ally of Rayner said: “She’s never really been away.”

She plans to turn her next focus to reforms of special needs education for children due to her personal experience, the person with knowledge of her thinking said, and could wade into other unexpected areas as government legislation winds up to the end of the parliamentary session in May. Allies say Rayner has chosen her interventions carefully, focusing on areas where she can win and help the government.

On paper, Rayner is an ordinary backbench MP for the first time in a decade. She has only three staff in parliament, though recently received a £50,000 donation for staffing costs from a local refrigeration firm.

Despite her long-standing relationship with Starmer (he said in 2023 that “whenever my back’s against the wall, Angela will get in touch”), she appears to push her campaigns through parliamentary channels rather than privately lobbying the PM. The person with knowledge of her thinking said the pair do speak, though not as much as when she was in government.

Yet at the same time, MPs and the media treat her as though she is still in the Cabinet.

“She can pick up the phone to any member of the Cabinet any time she wants, and they’ll take her call,” said the first MP ally quoted above. A second long-time ally said: “Half the time it’s ministers in the Cabinet coming to her to bail them out.”

When Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar called for Starmer to quit on Monday, Rayner was one of the senior figures he phoned to test the mood beforehand. When No. 10 launched an operation for Cabinet ministers to back Starmer on social media and prevent a coup, Rayner was contacted — by the government and journalists alike — asking if she would join in. She did.

Like with her interventions on policy, Rayner and her allies can argue that she is being helpful to the prime minister. But at the same time, her actions will endear her to Labour’s membership of around 250,000 people who will decide the result of any leadership race.

A third long-time ally of Rayner said: “Putting her love of the party above her personal ambition looks good to the membership. She’s a ridiculously smart and astute woman and she won’t want to be the one pulling the trigger [on Starmer].”

But points of tension may yet emerge. Rayner is planning to travel to Scotland to campaign for Sarwar ahead of the May elections, at a time when it will now be politically difficult for Starmer to do the same.

She is also due to appear at an event in mid-March with a new group called Mainstream, two people with knowledge of the planning said. Leading figures in the group have been critical of Starmer’s leadership.

Allies are also quick to contrast what they call Starmer’s managerial approach to politics with Rayner’s “soul.” While Starmer came to politics later from a career in law, Rayner’s background is well-known in Westminster: she left school pregnant and without qualifications aged 16 in Stockport, near Manchester, worked as a carer and then moved into politics through the trade union movement.

The third long-time ally quoted above said: “She has done politics in the gritty way, not the sterile move into politics Keir did — he didn’t have to make friends and alliances and cliques. Angela has all of those in spades. She has people everywhere — in Labour, unions, think tanks and lobbying shops — who will be willing to do things for her.”

This could also help her in a likely leadership battle against Streeting, who will struggle to win over a section of members on Labour’s left and faces his own difficult questions about his past ties to Mandelson. This week Streeting pre-emptively released friendly texts between himself and the former ambassador discussing the woes of the government.

Rayner, by contrast, has said privately that she exchanged no texts or WhatsApps with Mandelson at all since at least summer 2024, including in any groups, one person who has spoken to her said.

What about the public?

But even many of Rayner’s allies fear winning over her own party is not the problem.

“She’s already the party’s darling,” said one Labour official allied to Rayner. “She needs to do something to rehabilitate herself with the public.”

Rayner’s blunt style as deputy leader (she once called Tories “scum” at a conference reception) led to relentless attacks on her by opposition parties. Now, however, she is ranked by the polling firm YouGov as the second-most popular Labour politician, behind only Burnham.

One Conservative shadow Cabinet minister said they feared a Rayner leadership more than one led by Miliband, as she could shore up Labour’s northern heartlands from the right-wing Reform UK while holding off a left-wing drift to the Green Party and other rivals.

Allies believe she may also win some support from the small “Blue Labour” faction of socially conservative MPs, saying her political stance is more complex than the picture painted of her. 

“She shape-shifts around,” said the second MP ally quoted above. An MP from the Blue Labour group added it was about more than left or right: “She is genuine. She invites fascination — from the media, from the voters. She should play a part.”

Yet there is a looming question of what kind of prime minister she would be — especially as she has previously adapted to fit the times, having served both under left-winger Jeremy Corbyn and his successor Starmer.

Allies point to her time as Starmer’s deputy, leading meetings with foreign delegations that went far beyond her usual brief and having a good relationship with civil servants. The first long-time ally quoted above blamed “snobbishness,” based on Rayner’s working-class background, for claims she would be unable to do the job. They said: “She’s been deputy prime minister, she’s run a big department. Why wouldn’t she be able to manage right across government?”

But one Labour MP voiced fears about how the markets would react, especially if traders do not know the detail of a more left-wing platform. “I’m not sure even Angela knows what Angela wants to do,” they said.

And the biggest question of all remains not just whether Rayner will be able to run — but whether she will want to.

“She’s definitely gearing up after May to stand,” said the first long-time ally quoted above. But allies also say she struggles with intense media coverage and her complex family situation.

The third long-time ally quoted above predicted that even with Burnham and Miliband out of the picture, and if other soft left MPs (including the former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh) do not run, the chances of Rayner entering a leadership race were still only “90 percent.”

A second Cabinet minister said: “Angela has a big role to play in the future, but I’m not convinced that she wants to be leader.” 

She might end up having to make up her mind sooner than she would like.