Louise Haigh accused Keir Starmer’s allies of briefing “consistently and viciously” against her after she resigned as transport secretary in 2024. Speaking to Nick Robinson at the Crossed Wires festival in Sheffield, she said the attacks continued for quite a number of weeks after her exit from the cabinet.
Haigh said, “Both Morgan [McSweeney] and [Starmer] kept saying ‘well, additional information has emerged’, but at no point would any of them tell me what that additional information was.” She added that, “To pretend that I hadn’t told him and to brief so consistently and so viciously for quite a number of weeks after that was a deliberate attempt to knock my character down.”
Crossed Wires festival in Sheffield
Haigh said she had been a victim of a “cabal of men mistreating women” around the government. She named Lisa Nandy, Bridget Phillipson, Angela Rayner and Sue Gray as people who had been targeted, and said, “I certainly would take Bridget and Lisa’s word for it. I mean, they have both been, as have I, obviously, victims of incredibly sexist and unpleasant briefing in the press.”
She also said, “The idea that there wasn’t a cabal of men that were deliberately mistreating women around the government is just fanciful.” Haigh said the treatment of Sue Gray was “absolutely disgraceful,” and described the culture around No 10 under Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney as a “boys’ club.”
Haigh and the 2013 fraud case
Haigh said she had told Keir Starmer about her 2013 fraud conviction several years before she was sacked, after pleading guilty to fraudulently reporting a lost mobile phone as stolen. She said the dispute over what had been said then, and what had supposedly emerged later, sat at the centre of her resignation from the cabinet in 2024.
She said the repeated reference to “additional information” was never explained to her, and cast the later briefings as part of a wider effort to damage her standing after she left office.
Andy Burnham and No 10
Haigh said she did not expect a cabinet job as chancellor in Andy Burnham’s government, and said she would not support splitting up the Treasury in this parliament because “it would just drag everything down and be a huge distraction.” She said there needed to be “a proper beefed up economic unit in Number 10 that both the prime minister and the chancellor have access to.”
Downing Street has been contacted for comment. For Haigh, the immediate question is whether the accusation that senior allies ran a weeks-long briefing campaign will deepen scrutiny of how women around the government were treated after her resignation.
