I have a confession to make: There was once a time when I secretly liked Angela Rayner. We have chatted in the MPs’ tea-room, I’ve laughed with her – that honking, mischievous guffaw of hers is infectious.

I admired her conviction and wanted her to do well – an odd thing for someone whose political views are oil to my water.

It was, however, an emotional response to a fellow northern girl who had arrived in Westminster, walked a hard path to get there and was from a similar council house background to myself.

But, ye gods, what a grifter she has become. A money-grasping scrounger of the worst order, because beyond the cash signs flashing in her eyes, she is a gold-plated hypocrite.

To explain why, I need to rewind to 2022 when I left the Conservative Cabinet as Culture Secretary. In my last ministerial pay packet was a severance sum of £16,876.

It was not a hard-fought-for payout but an automatic sum given to all departing ministers.

Full disclosure, I didn’t even know such a thing existed. However, two years later, that payment was seemingly a topic of utmost national importance after a newspaper had spotted it when my old department made public their annual accounts. Apparently, there was a rule that no minister over 65 should receive the sum, so I’d been paid in error.

It seemed a pretty ageist rule that should be changed, but it wasn’t for me to make that point.

I have a confession to make: There was once a time when I secretly liked Angela Rayner . We have chatted in the MPs’ tea-room, I’ve laughed with her – that honking, mischievous guffaw of hers is infectious, writes Nadine Dorries

Nadine left the Conservative Cabinet as Culture Secretary in 2022 and was given a severance sum of £16,876 - then found out about a rule that no minister over 65 should receive the sum, and was determined to pay it back

I could have instructed my solicitors to mount a case for refusing to return what was a lot of money, however that’s not me.

I respected the Ministerial Code, and resolved to promptly return the cash, but not before I was predictably besieged by Left-wing journalists demanding to know if I’ll be paying the money back.

Leading the charge was the shrill and always unpleasant Emily Thornberry (no surprise that neither Keir Starmer nor Andy Burnham found a home for her in their cabinets). She was screeching my name to any journalist and media outlet who would listen, and so it was inevitable that the BBC would call, asking if I’d submit myself to a Laura Kuenssberg grilling.

I thought the media outcry so odd. I even joked on the Kuenssberg show that I was gutted that now everyone knew my real age.

Yet still the calls kept coming. Journalists weren’t satisfied that I’d pledged to repay the money, so were demanding I send them screenshots from my bank account to prove I had done so.

The following day, the payment was made, a wrong was righted and the world could begin spinning again. At no point did I double down on the error and refuse to repay. Meanwhile Angela Rayner has dug her leopard-print heels in over paying back the severance she received upon being fired as Housing Minister last year.

So is she being pursued by the Today programme on Radio 4? Has her phone exploded with the same journalists demanding to see screenshots of her bank account? Of course not. It’s one rule for Rayner and it was another for me.

But what really buffs that brass neck of hers is that it was she who fought tooth and nail to amend the Ministerial Code in 2024 to include the clause that ‘No person departing ministerial office while under investigation for allegations of gross misconduct or breaching the Ministerial Code will be entitled to severance pay’. And here we are. Rayner is sticking two fingers up at the very code she helped amend. For let’s not forget how she was booted out of Cabinet by Starmer.

Has her phone exploded with the same journalists demanding to see screenshots of her bank account? Of course not. It’s one rule for Rayner and it was another for me, says Nadine

Last autumn, journalists had discovered she’d undercooked the stamp duty payment on her second home, an £800,000 flat in Hove, by £40,000. A pretty hefty accounting mistake at the very least.

She was reported to HMRC and also to the Parliamentary ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus, who conceded that while Rayner had ‘acted with integrity… I consider the [Ministerial] Code to have been breached.’ So in September she scuttled off to the backbenches, but at least her pockets had been lined with nearly £17,000 in severance pay.

Had she lived a life of penury for the ten months she was deprived of a ministerial salary, I could forgive her for wanting to keep the cash. But far from it. Hold my beer while I give you a brief rundown on what she has earned on her money-grubbing ‘gap year’.

An advance for her upcoming memoir won her £61,500, while she raked in £104,000 in public speaking, including two £20,000 gigs for Deutsche Bank and a property trade body.

With her severance payment, this takes her outside earnings to a cool £182,000 – and let’s not forget the clothes and perks donated to her by Labour peer, Lord Ali.

This is so far removed from her pious pledge in 2023 on MPs earning second incomes as to be comical. ‘Being an MP is not a second job. It is the job,’ she opined. ‘Labour will put an end to this racket.’ Well, let this be Andy Burnham’s first test of his party’s so-called values.

But there is a greater point to be made here beyond the party political. I want all women who arrive in Westminster to prove that they are as capable as any man.

When you are from a background like mine and Rayner’s, one of poverty and adversity, you carry a greater responsibility because you have to prove the point, over and over, that you are worthy of the appointment to ministerial office. Why? Because it helps to ensure that the ladder of opportunity remains firmly on the ground for the benefit of other women from similar backgrounds.

We owe it to the democratic process that the ladder isn’t hauled up by those from backgrounds of privilege based on manufactured pre-conceptions that people like Rayner and I aren’t quite the ticket and don’t have what it takes to hold office.

It is the reason why, when I became a minister, I worked twice as hard and ensured that I left each office with a proven tick-box record of achievement.

It was Rayner’s responsibility to do the same. To hold herself to higher standards, to prove to the world that Westminster benefits when it includes people like us.

Rayner, by her own record of behaviour, has let down every woman of working class stock. She has tarnished us with her brush and will spend the rest of her life remembered not for anything she achieved while she was a minister (because there’s nothing there). But for the whiff of scandal that lingered in her wake each time she moved office.

Is this really the best Andy Burnham can do? In appointing Rayner, he has made the subliminal statement that standards and the ministerial code don’t matter.

Let me tell him, they do matter, and any prime minister who thinks that it’s OK to appoint someone so lacking in moral and ethical clarity as Rayner is clearly heading for a fall.