What do you have to do to get dispatched from Keir Starmer’s Government these days? On the face of it, not much. A spent criminal conviction from more than a decade ago and one bad front page were enough for Louise Haigh, who lasted about 12 hours as Transport Secretary after the first story revealing her 2014 conviction for fraud emerged.
In her exchange of letters with Starmer, she pointed out that he had known about this case, opening with “as you know, in 2013 I was mugged in London”. Haigh’s account is that she was mugged, thought her work phone had been taken during that mugging and reported it to the police, before discovering that she still had it. She admitted that not immediately telling her employer and the police was a “mistake” and also said she should not have taken the advice that she did from her solicitor to give no comment during her police interview or to plead guilty in magistrates’ court.
Haigh had told Starmer about the conviction when he made her shadow Northern Ireland secretary in opposition, and he had clearly felt her explanation was sufficient not to bar her from taking on such a sensitive role then, or indeed from entering Government in July.
So what, other than more people finding out about it, changed?
That question is important because the answer tells us a lot about Starmer as a leader. He may have decided that after four months where Government mistakes and mishaps have dominated the news agenda, he could ill afford even a couple of days of negative stories about one of his Cabinet ministers. He learned from the row about donated clothing and concert tickets that stories don’t go away just because you’ve given what you think is a reasonable explanation.
In Haigh’s case, there are clearly people from her time at Aviva, where she was working when the phone disappeared, who think there is more to the story than Haigh might have suggested to her leader in her explanation. Their account is that there were repeated incidences of phones disappearing which Aviva then investigated and referred to the police. When stories like this emerge years after the event, there is almost guaranteed to be a few days of further headlines as others come forward to offer their recollections.
Starmer might have learned from his own problems with donated glasses, but is there also something for him to learn from this case? He likes to remind us at every opportunity that he is a former director of public prosecutions, and is more likely than any other politician to have tugged at the threads of the story offered to him by Haigh. Was he sufficiently curious about what really happened? If he wasn’t, then that might explain why he felt his minister had to go when all the facts emerged.
But it also reveals a weakness on his part. A surprising weakness, too, given Starmer prides himself on his ability to pull apart partial accounts of what happened and to hold people to account for their actions.
There is another explanation for all this that goes beyond a few days of bad headlines, which is that this is a convenient departure. Haigh’s replacement, Heidi Alexander, is a hugely experienced and impressive figure who, unlike Haigh, actually had experience of working in government before taking on the Transport brief: she was deputy mayor for transport for Sadiq Khan.
Haigh had not just caused Starmer one night of bad news. She had also, according to some of her own colleagues in Government, not been performing all that well as a minister. The row over her description of P&O as a “rogue operator” nearly derailed Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s flagship investment summit when the ferry operator’s owner DP World threatened to drop out of the event and cast doubt over a planned £1bn investment.
Even earlier in the Government’s brief tenure so far, Haigh’s deal with the transport unions to end the train drivers’ strike cast Labour as being on the side of the producers, not the consumers, despite strenuous efforts in opposition to suggest otherwise. Perhaps if things had been running smoothly at Transport, Starmer might have taken longer to dispatch Haigh.
But even on this, Haigh cannot be entirely blamed – not only is Starmer the boss who signs off or blocks pay deals in industrial disputes, it was also his own Government that used the “rogue operator” line in a press release on its own website. Haigh was not freelancing in a live radio interview – she was repeating an official line.
She may have ended up being more easily disposable than some of her other Government colleagues, but in every scenario, Haigh’s departure tells us as much about the Prime Minister as it does about her.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine
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