Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer seemed to forget Angela Rayner’s job title during an interview with BBC 5 Live. He was discussing the current furore surrounding the purchase of her new home in Hove, for which she dodged a massive £40,000 stamp duty bill on the seaside apartment after telling tax authorities it was her main home. Throwing his support behind her, he inadvertently referred to his deputy as the Prime Minister.

“Angela has had people briefing against her and talking her down over and over again,” Starmer said. “It’s a big mistake… Angela is an incredible Prime Minister, an incredible person.” The slip didn’t go unnoticed as one X user shared it to the platform and queried what they had just heard. “Keir Starmer has just referred to Angela Rayner as ‘An incredible Prime Minister’. Was this a genuine accident or Freudian slip, what exactly is on Keir Starmer’s mind,” they pondered.

In the interview with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley, Starmer was asked if Rayner was the victim of a sexist and classist “briefing war”, as her supporters have claimed.

“Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly – and I’m proud of her – as our deputy prime minister,” Starmer declared, defending his colleague.

He added she was a “great story of British success”, and gave working-class children “a real sense of aspiration”.

The Deputy Prime Minister has come under fire as she is understood to have stripped her name from the deeds of her Greater Manchester house, just weeks before splashing out £800,000 on a plush flat in Hove, East Sussex.

This allowed Rayner to dodge a £70,000 stamp duty bill that would have landed if the Hove property had been treated as her second home.

Instead, she is thought to have stumped up just £30,000, the Telegraph reports. Meanwhile, she told Tameside and Brighton and Hove councils that her Greater Manchester property is still her primary residence and the Hove flat was a second home.

While the arrangements are entirely legal, they spark questions over whether she has deliberately juggled her property affairs to slash her stamp duty and council tax bills.

A surcharge on stamp duty for second home buyers was brought in by the previous Tory government in 2016, with the rate hiked by current Chancellor Rachel Reeves last October in a brutal move designed to target the wealthy and boost Treasury coffers.