She has been accused of not paying the correct tax on the sale of her home, of using her legs to distract the Prime Minister at the despatch box, and of drinking in public from a ridiculously large wine glass.

Now Angela Rayner has truly crossed the line, perpetrating an outrage that no decent society should be expected to tolerate: she has let the trees in her front garden grow too big.

A “fed up” neighbour told a newspaper that the Deputy Prime Minister’s apple and beech trees were blocking the light from his garden. He would speak to her about it, but she was never about, he complained. Too busy building up her property empire, perhaps. Haven’t you heard?

In what was a slow bank holiday weekend in England, some papers decided the top story was Rayner buying an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex. Taking into account her constituency home in Ashton-under-Lyne (the one with the Triffid trees), and her use of a government flat in Admiralty House, she was duly dubbed “Three Pads Rayner” in the hope it would annoy her as much as “Two Jags Prescott” did her late predecessor.

Further questions have been asked and answered, including who will pay the council tax on the government-owned flat (er, the government) and whether she will pay double council tax on her second home at the seaside (she will). What I’d like to know is how someone can buy an £800k flat on a Cabinet Minister’s salary of £161,409.

Rayner would no doubt argue it is her business where the money comes from, and that it is hugely patronising to question her purchase of a nice house when most MPs, Conservative ones in particular, have even grander homes. Is it because she’s from a working-class background, she might well ask? None of her critics would dare say it, but yes. It’s one thing for the middle classes to play the property game, but a working-class ex-single mum from an estate? Who does she think she is?

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