The host of a popular political podcast posed an intriguing question last week: ‘Where is the lesser-spotted Angela Rayner?‘

Spending time with her neglected constituents? Plotting a comeback? Or making the best of last week’s sunshine with a trip to the Sussex seaside? All of them, to an extent, were true.

After being spotted in her Manchester constituency last weekend, she swerved the Labour Party conference in Liverpool and headed straight for the south coa

Here, as The Mail on Sunday can reveal, she has been keeping her head down at her luxury flat in Hove – the scene of the ‘crime‘, so to speak, as it was the purchase of this seaside property that led to her downfall and self-imposed purdah over unpaid stamp duty.

Ms Rayner was joined by her boyfriend, former Labour MP-turned-lobbyist Sam Tarry, who attended the annual jamboree before travelling to join her. Although absent from Liverpool for obvious reasons, Angela’s spirit (her ghost, critics would say) loomed large over the main hall.

Sightings of the ‘lesser-spotted’ Rayner since her resignation as Deputy Prime Minister a month ago have been rarer than hen’s teeth. So, understandably, there has been fascination, not just among Westminster-watchers, about her whereabouts and her future.

Judging by the rapturous applause and cheers the very mention of her name elicited from the conference audience, many are asking whether a sensational comeback is perhaps on the cards? Even in her absence the dethroned Red Queen managed to hog the headlines.

But what will her next move be? Can she afford to keep the Hove apartment, the cause of all her problems, or will she be forced to sell? Will there be a leadership challenge?

These questions will be addressed shortly.

After being spotted in her Manchester constituency last weekend, Angela Rayner swerved the Labour Party conference in Liverpool and headed straight for the south coast

Ms Rayner pictured with her boyfriend, former Labour MP-turned-lobbyist Sam Tarry, at Parklife Festival in Heaton Park earlier this yea

For the moment, though, the enduring – and colourful – soap opera that surrounds Ms Rayner has been overshadowed, and put tragically into perspective, by the terrible events at a Manchester synagogue, not so far from where she was brought up in Stockport.

Her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, where her two sons live with her ex-husband in the former marital home, is on the other side of the city to Crumpsall, where the atrocity occurred.

‘I am horrified and appalled at the attack on worshippers at a synagogue in Manchester on the holy day of Yom Kippur,’ Ms Rayner posted on X, from her residence on the Sussex coast. ‘My thoughts are with the victims and their families.’

She turned up in Hove late on Tuesday in a BMW SUV driven by a protection officer, according to neighbours, just hours after her former boss delivered his tub-thumping speech to the rank and file in Liverpool.

A specialist unit within the Met provides security for senior politicians to which Ms Rayner is seemingly still entitled because, locals believe, the walls of the Victorian mansion block, which contains her first-floor flat, along with a piece of construction chipboard across the road, were daubed with offensive graffiti (‘Tax Evader’).

Yet the removal of those words by council workmen prompted complaints that Ms Rayner received special treatment from some in the neighbourhood where, despite the stamp duty scandal, she has been warmly welcomed.

In fact, the clean-up operation, to avoid any doubt, was paid for by a member of the public (Ms Rayner herself, surely).

She has spent most of the past week in her flat, ‘a piece of coastal paradise’, to quote the original marketing blurb, after being seen (for the first time since losing her job) in her constituency last weekend.

On one of the few occasions she ventured out with her boyfriend, again in the BMW, according to neighbours, they left early in the morning and returned under cover of darkness. What a stark contrast to her arrival in this corner of the south coast just a few months ago when she announced herself with a much-publicised appearance on the beach in a camo pink Dryrobe, sipping a glass of chilled wine on the pebbles and vaping in a kayak.

Her jolly summer by the sea has now, in more ways than one, turned into an overcast autumn.

Ms Rayner’s reduced financial circumstances after leaving the Cabinet, when her salary was cut from £161,409 to £93,904, has led to speculation that she might be forced to sell the £800,000 Hove apartment.

Actually, she has no intention of selling it – not for the moment anyway, the MoS has been told by one of her associates, who reveals: ‘She desperately wants to keep the flat. She loves it. It could be where her life is after politics.’

Tarry, 43, has a home close to his former wife and young children in neighbouring Brighton, which is why Ms Rayner moved to the city, using her life savings – £150,000 from the sale of her stake in the family home in Greater Manchester – as a deposit on the property.

Indeed, on Wednesday, a carpenter turned up just before lunch and then proceeded to carry a large wooden kitchen worktop through the front entrance, before reappearing on her terrace where he sanded and sawed for much of the afternoon.

‘She’s obviously carrying out improvements to the flat to make it hers,’ said a local who saw the ‘chippy’ pulling up in his van before going to work inside. ‘He was very busy sorting it out and left late in the afternoon.

‘There were many of us who thought she may end up putting the property on the market and move away from the area after the controversy which led to her losing her job, but this very much suggests she is here to stay.’

Ms Rayner allegedly avoided £40,000 in stamp duty by telling the taxman that her new £800,000 property in Hove (pictured) was her main home

Designating her primary residence for council tax purposes as Ashton meant Ms Rayner avoided having to pay council tax on her third home, her grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House (pictured), central Londo

A few weeks ago, two men were also seen taking measurements for what looked to be new blinds or French doors.

In any event, Ms Rayner faces a hefty bill from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs for dodging £40,000 in stamp duty which she will have to repay with £1,000 interest, say financial experts and, an expected penalty, likely to be somewhere between £6,000 and £12,000 for ‘careless behaviour’.

Total bill: more than £50,000.

The upshot is Ms Rayner’s mortgage repayments could be as high as £4,000 a month against an income after tax of £5,400 a month. She has the support of Mr Tarry, sacked as Shadow Transport Minister in 2022 for joining striking railway workers on the picket line before losing his Ilford South seat in the General Election last year. He now advises lobby consultancy group Henham Strategy.

Henham pays well. One adviser, for example, banked £4,000 a month for just 15 hours’ work with the company, which is a nice gig if you can get it.

Many of the consultancy’s clients fell under Ms Rayner’s brief when she was in charge of the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. Henham stressed Tarry ‘worked on a number of areas unrelated to that department to ensure no conflicts of interest arise’.

Maybe so. But Henham’s website points out that the firm ‘leverage’ the contacts of their team to ‘help clients engage and influence key decision makers’.

Few could have imagined when Angela Rayner was in her pomp just a few months ago – resulting in her being called ‘Three Pads Rayner’ – that her financial situation would now be the subject of national discussion and gossip.

One consequence of her being banished to the back benches is that, like her fellow MPs, she is encouraged to stay in a hotel when in London on parliamentary business with an allowance of up to £230 a night – which is better value for taxpayers than MPs renting second homes on expenses. You can find comfortable enough accommodation with £230 but it won’t come close to Admiralty House, the grace-and-favour flat which came with being Deputy Prime Minister and was once the Whitehall residence of Winston Churchill.

Ms Rayner enjoyed other perks, too. She accepted donations for clothes from Labour peer Lord Alli and has stayed in his New York flat with Mr Tarry. There was also, among other things, £1,000 worth of free tickets to Brighton Pride.

All that has gone. For the moment, at least.

She will be buoyed, however, by what happened in Liverpool when she was name-checked by speaker after speaker. ‘We need her back,’ declared Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, a line apparently ad-libbed; not cleared, therefore, by No 10.

They were sure, Downing Street said afterwards, that the Prime Minister would have approved.

On Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer added his voice of support, telling LBC radio that Rayner will continue to be a ‘major voice’ in British politics and hinting that she could return to front-line politics sooner rather than later.

Such a public vote of confidence for one who was forced to resign for breaking the Ministerial Code by ‘failing to maintain the highest standards of proper conduct’!

‘She was the most talked-about person in the bars in the conference centre, apart from Farage,’ said someone who was at the Labour jamboree, which is saying something considering how much time was devoted to demonising the Reform UK leader (‘enemy’ of Britain, ‘snake oil salesman’, ‘racist’ immigration policies).

Might the show of support provide the platform for her comeback? It would seem so. ‘I hear she’s plotting – of course she is – her people are plotting,’ said another person who was at the conference. ‘There are many people here [at the Labour conference] who want her to be plotting.’

It is a widely held view.

Ms Rayner was pictured campaigning with Andy Burnham in March last year ahead of the Manchester Mayoral election which he won. And the two were filmed singing karaoke together at a previous party conference, raising the prospect that they could join forces to mount a leadership challenge. ‘It’s nonsense,’ said the associate of Rayner who told us she would not be selling the Hove flat. ‘She will be making a comeback, though.’

‘It will start with a mea culpa interview on TV,’ said the well-placed source. ‘It will be with a woman. It will be tearful. It will be emotional. And it will stress her working-class credentials.’

She gave a similar interview to Sky shortly before she resigned last month.

Raised on a Stockport council estate, remember, she left school with no qualifications, was pregnant at 16 and became a grandmother at 37. You’ve heard it all before, not just from Angela herself but from her many admirers at the Labour conference last week.

She would not have far to look for a campaign manager if she decides not just to make a comeback – which seems inevitable – but also to challenge for the leadership. Her boyfriend has the relevant experience, after all.

Sam Tarry was Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign director. He was also sacked as a Shadow Minister by Sir Keir, so there’s no love lost there.