If Angela Rayner is to be believed, she waited a surprisingly long time to tell the world about her strikingly convenient letter from HMRC confirming she had been ‘cleared’ of impropriety over her failure to pay tens of thousands of pounds in stamp duty on her luxury flat in Hove, East Sussex.

The letter, she has suggested, arrived on Tuesday – helpfully clearing the dark clouds of the tax investigation that had been hanging over her since September last year.

Tuesday, of course, was the day rebellious ministers were resigning and dozens of MPs were calling on Sir Keir Starmer to go. You might imagine that Ms Rayner, 46, would have immediately wanted to release this revelation to the media, given her well-publicised ambition to become prime minister herself. Not so. Nor did she tell the world on Wednesday, when Parliament was full for the King’s Speech, and the news subsequently broke that Wes Streeting was ‘preparing’ to run for the Labour leadership.

It was only yesterday morning, after it had become clear Mr Streeting was on the verge of resigning, that Team Rayner offered exclusive interviews to ITV and The Guardian revealing HMRC had cleared her of ‘deliberate wrongdoing’ or ‘carelessness’ over her failure to fork out the £40,000 duty on the £800,000 pad.

Team Rayner – which is led by her partner, hard-Left former Labour MP Sam Tarry, 43 – stipulated that the information went live at 6am. Why? So the story would divert attention from any statement Mr Streeting might put out.

Ms Rayner has not published the correspondence from HMRC, although the BBC claims it has seen an email to her lawyers allegedly verifying the matter is closed.

Yet the chaotic state of her finances is not the only reason for doubting Ms Rayner’s suitability for high office. Indeed, given that she has repeatedly sparked fears she has neither the intellect nor the self-control necessary to lead the nation, critics insist that the idea Ms Rayner can tout herself as a prime minister-in-waiting defies belief.

She tends to dismiss attacks on her intellect and prefers to make a virtue of her inspirational backstory, which saw her brought up in poverty on a council estate, leaving school at 16 while pregnant and with no qualifications, before rising to become deputy prime minister.

Yet only last month, her behaviour in the House of Commons’ Strangers’ Bar one Monday evening shocked and appalled fellow MPs. The Daily Mail disclosed how she got involved in a heated debate with a group of fellow drinkers and was heard shouting: ‘I’m a socialist.’

Onlookers were said to have been left ‘open-mouthed’ at the sight of a former deputy prime minister so clearly the worse for wear, with some witnesses claiming she was ‘trolleyed’, while one in the bar described her as ‘absolutely obliterated’.

As she left, Ms Rayner collided with the door – the force of the impact leaving her bent over. While the door was removed for repairs the very next day, parliamentary officials said this move wasn’t linked to the incident. Naturally, Ms Rayner’s office denied she was drunk and disorderly, claiming the report was ‘a concoction of mischief-making’.

But this incident is by no means a one-off. Her lifestyle has long attracted controversy, not least when, as deputy PM, she lived in a grace-and-favour apartment in Admiralty House in Whitehall once occupied by Sir Winston Churchill and her political hero John Prescott, Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister.

The parties she held there, to a soundtrack of booming house music, have entered political folklore.

A notorious party animal, Ms Rayner even has a signature cocktail, which she has christened Venom, that consists of a bottle of vodka, a bottle of Southern Comfort, ten bottles of Blue WKD and a litre of orange juice. At one party, a male Labour councillor drank so much of it that he was later found fast asleep in a dog basket.

While most ministers would seek to play down any idea that they are politics’ answer to notorious hell-raising actor Oliver Reed, Ms Rayner appears to revel in her image.

In 2023, she revealed that when she went to the supermarket often the only items in her basket were vapes and bottles of wine.

That same year she went on a holiday in Spain where she partied round-the-clock. ‘The girls I was raving with are half my age, and I was like a grandma,’ she recalled. ‘I was proud of that. I started at 4pm and I got home at six o’clock in the morning when the sun was shining and I was like: “Yes, I can do it”.’

A month after the 2024 general election, she was spotted ‘raving’ behind the DJ deck at Hi Ibiza, a renowned nightclub on the Spanish party island – still in the same red dress she had worn to the Cabinet meeting that day.

Alcohol was also blamed for her astonishing performance at the Labour conference in 2021, when she tore into the Tories as ‘homophobic, racist, misogynistic’ and a ‘bunch of scum’. After refusing to back down, wiser counsels prevailed and a little over a week later she apologised.

No wonder one source told the Daily Mail: ‘Everyone in Labour admires her story and what she has achieved. But that doesn’t mean you want her being the person making the big decisions at 3am.’

It is a tribute to her unshakeable self-belief that she still considers herself a serious challenger in the current leadership contest.

And her tax troubles are not necessarily completely behind her.

While she is unlikely to have had any difficulty paying the £40,000 she owed HMRC – as she not only received a £17,000 redundancy payment when she left the Cabinet but has earned a nifty £59,000 from four speeches since returning to the backbenches – the verdict of Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ministerial ethics, continues to hang over her.

After reviewing the flat purchase in Hove last summer, Sir Laurie concluded that she ‘acted with integrity’ but failed to meet the ‘highest possible standards of proper conduct’ required by the Ministerial Code. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

So what now? Ms Rayner is still debating with her advisers whether to run. But the fact that no fewer than four website domain names with variations on the theme of ‘Angela 4 PM’ have been registered would indicate that she has been seriously considering it.

She’s told colleagues she has not done a deal with Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, who is ineligible to stand for the leadership as he does not have a Commons seat.

But yesterday it emerged that the MP for Makerfield, a constituency in Greater Manchester, was resigning so ‘Andy Burnham can fight to re-enter Parliament’. If he does so, Ms Rayner might defer to him in the hope of securing a senior role in his administration.

 She might also give way if Ed Miliband, the Net Zero Secretary, decides to run. ‘She will not want to split the Left-wing vote,’ says one supporter. ‘But Sam Tarry is telling her every day she can and must run. And he’s the most important voice in her ear.’

What is clear is that she is in no mood to help Sir Keir. I can disclose that despite being all smiles when she was with the PM – and Mr Burnham – on a school visit in Manchester last month, private talks with him did not go well. While the Prime Minister told Ms Rayner he wanted her back in the Cabinet, and even asked if she would do the Sunday media round after last week’s local elections, she said no to both. ‘She feels Starmer threw her under a bus over the flat purchase,’ I’m told. ‘She’s spoiling for a fight with him.’

Ms Rayner has certainly been on manoeuvres over the past week. She spoke on Monday at the Communication Workers Union, saying: ‘It is clear that what we are doing isn’t working and it needs to change.’

Then there was the 1,000-word manifesto released last Sunday in which she slammed ‘the toxic culture of cronyism’ at No 10 that led to the appointment of Peter Mandelson, despite his links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as ambassador to the US.

But another element of this document cast renewed doubt on her competence. In a passage about housing reform, she included the line ‘ending freehold for good’.

Apparently, it should have said ‘leasehold’. One Labour source sneered: ‘If a former housing secretary doesn’t know the difference between leasehold and freehold, that’s a worry if they think they can be PM.’

Her supporters are also making much of the fact the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne would not only be the first-ever female Labour leader but also the first PM from the party’s Northern heartlands since Harold Wilson in 1964.

The past three Labour leaders – Mr Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir – all live within a short bus ride of each other in north London, while Mr Streeting is in the city’s east.

What is not in doubt is that Ms Rayner is keen to get back into government. She enjoys the perks of power. Questions are already being asked about why Ms Rayner went on a trade mission to Ethiopia in March last year when, as Housing Secretary, she was meant to be spearheading plans to ‘get Britain building’.

Flights for Ms Rayner and her entourage cost an estimated £20,000, and her conduct once there was also controversial. She was accused of trying to include a private safari in her itinerary – a move that was shot down by civil servants, who told her: ‘That’s not how these things work.’

Months earlier, Ms Rayner had gone on a visit to meet the late Pope Francis. Clearly His Holiness’s ascetic ways failed to rub off on the ladette from Stockport.