Will Angela Rayner get a payout? What are the terms of parliament's severance settlement? Did she want to change the system?

The deputy prime minister was found to have breached the ministerial code.

Sir Keir Starmer’s ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus found she had breached the ministerial code over her underpayment of stamp duty on a seaside flat. Sir Laurie said Rayner had “acted with integrity”, but failed to “heed the caution” contained within legal advice she received when buying the £800,000 property in Hove - in short, he decided that while she had not tried to fiddle the system, she should have sought specialist advice over the complicated transaction, rather than assuming that what a conveyancer had told her was correct.

She will now return to the backbenches, and her salary will drop from £161,409 to £93,904 as she forfeits the additional income she received for serving as Housing and Communities Secretary.

The mortgage on the £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex, is £650,000, according to official documents, which means the monthly payments could be as much as £3,500; some, including the Daily Mail have questioned how she will fund the payments - as well as the extra £40,000 stamp duty for which she is now liable - and have suggested that it may need to be sold.

However, there is another intriguing financial question in the wings. An opposition bill was brought in February last year, before Labour were in power, by Emily Thornberry.

The Ministerial severance (reform) bill saw Sir Keir Starmer, Thornberry, Pat McFadden, Dame Nia Griffith, Sir Alan Campbell and Rayner as the signatories, and called for a reform of the severance payments system in parliament given to departing ministers. This had been in the news in the months before as a revolving door at the Home Office, for example, had seen Dame Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Grant Shapps and Braverman again hold the office of Home Secretary from September 6 to October 25, 2022, during the tumultuous weeks bookending Liz Truss’s short premiership.

One of the clauses of the bill referred to this, asking that: “Any person who returns to ministerial office after three weeks but within the period equivalent to the number of days of salary that they were paid in severance must return the corresponding amount of their severance payment.”

But another part, pertinent to Rayner here, said that “no person departing ministerial office while under investigation for allegations of gross misconduct or breaching the ministerial code will be entitled to a severance payment unless and until they are cleared of those allegations by the relevant authority”

Parliament’s website says that the bill - 18 months on - is still awaiting its second reading and as there has been a new government it is going no further in its current format.

Rayner would be entitled to a £16,876 severance payment under the current rules. The question now is, having backed 18 months ago a plan that would have denied her the money, will she take it now?