Louise Haigh has accused Keir Starmer’s allies of briefing “consistently and viciously” against her after she resigned as transport secretary as she spoke openly about her departure from the cabinet in 2024 and her reasons for backing Andy Burnham.
Talking to the BBC’s Nick Robinson, she said she had been a victim of a “cabal of men mistreating women”, who also targeted her cabinet colleagues Lisa Nandy, Bridget Phillipson and Angela Rayner, as well as Starmer’s former chief of staff Sue Gray.
Haigh was sacked from the cabinet after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to fraudulently reporting a lost mobile phone as stolen in 2013, something she says she had told Starmer about several years before being sacked.
She has since helped mastermind Burnham’s likely ascent to power, with the former Manchester mayor expected to be confirmed as prime minister in days.
Speaking to Robinson’s podcast, Political Thinking, at the Crossed Wires festival in Sheffield, 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: “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.”
Talking more generally about the “boys’ club” culture which many Labour MPs have complained existed in No 10 under Starmer and his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, Haigh added: “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. Angela has. The way Sue Gray was treated was absolutely disgraceful.”
She said: “The idea that there wasn’t a cabal of men that were deliberately mistreating women around the government is just fanciful.”
Downing Street has been contacted for comment.
Haigh’s departure from cabinet and the way she was treated afterwards – Starmer’s public letter acknowledging her departure was three sentences long – arguably helped pave the way for the prime minister’s own downfall.
As a backbencher, the Sheffield Heeley MP helped organise the welfare rebellion which badly damaged Starmer’s authority, before persuading many of her colleagues to back Burnham as a successor and then running his campaign for Makerfield.
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Haigh is tipped for a cabinet job in Burnham’s government, but told Robinson it would not be as chancellor.
She accepted that the government would not pursue her idea of splitting up the Treasury in this parliament, saying “it would just drag everything down and be a huge distraction”.
But she did argue for a more powerful economic unit within No 10 which could push back on some of the decisions being made by whoever becomes Burnham’s chancellor.
“There needs to be a proper beefed up economic unit in number 10 that both the prime minister and the chancellor have access to, and that can give the prime minister a full suite of advice when they’re making these huge decisions that affect the country,” she said.
