As the Labour Party continues to shoulder criticism amid a sea of scandals including scrapping the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners and the PM himself having accepted numerous high value freebies – the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner hasn’t walked away unscathed after it emerged she had hired a taxpayer funded photographer to boost her image.
Photographers for the Prime Minister are hardly new, with Downing Street having employed numerous photographers over the years to document the PM’s activities on official engagements – however this is the first time that a Deputy PM has been awarded one of her own.
Simon Walker has been given the title of Chief Photographer to the Deputy PM and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and is now set to earn a salary of £68,000 a year to snap Ms.Rayner as she goes about her duties.
Yesterday Ms.Rayner yesterday acknowledged that voters were “angry” about the number of senior political figures including Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves that had benefitted from freebies worth “thousands of pounds” such as clothes, holidays and tickets, from wealthy donors.
However, she defended accepting them and argued that donations have been a “feature of our politics for a very long time” while also insisting that she didn’t believe she had broken any rules.
Despite her insistence however, the Conservative Party were not convinced andlast night urged the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to investigate whether Ms Rayner breached Commons rules, after she failed to declare that former Labour MP Sam Tarry had joined her on a trip to New York, when she stayed in a Manhattan apartment owned by millionaire donor Lord Alli.
A Tory source told the The Daily Mail. : “Are there any greater vanity projects than the Deputy Prime Minister with her thousands of pounds of free clothes, her luxury free holiday, and now her publicly paid photographer?”
Ms Rayner’s decision to hire a personal photographer amid the ongoing controversy is just one of several actions in her attempt to promote what she describes privately as “Brand Angela” amid speculation she is being “marginalised” in government.
A spokesman for Ms Rayner’s Housing, Communities and Local Government department said: “Many government departments employ official photographers to share the work of the department and ministers with the public.
“This is a civil service role and will be part of the department’s communications team.”
Since assuming office earlier this Summer, plans for a huge ‘office of the Deputy Prime Minister’ have been scrapped, with several hefty chunks of her brief hived off to other ministers, such as Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds who will be taking the lead on employment rights.
She also narrowly missed out on a grace-and-favour residence tucked away in Buckinghamshire, after Downing Street decided to award the 21 bedroomed sprawling Dorneywood mansion to Chancellor Rachel Reeves instead of the Deputy PM.
However, despite the optics, Ms.Rayner insisted she wasn’t being sidelined as she told the BBC: “I’m not being pushed out.”
