The Louise Haigh affair is a cock-up by Team Starmer

This breaks several Westminster norms over ministerial departures: firstly, it is shockingly early, with the scandal so far seeming less incriminating the more anyone looks into it. Secondly, Haigh was a relatively well-liked and effective minister: in her short time in office she had resolved a years-long strike dispute, helped head off a second one, grasped the nettle that is HS2 and even got the advertising boards at Euston station turned off.

Thirdly, the letter from Keir Starmer in response to her resignation was, by Westminster standards, absolutely brutal. It is the norm for a prime minister accepting the resignation of a member of his Cabinet to lavish them with praise, however dire the offence leading to their departure was. Starmer’s letter is curt, at a mere five short sentences, going nowhere near filling the page. It sends an extra message in itself.

It is often said that prime ministers should accept the facts that a scandal won’t be survivable and act sooner than they do. Even for crises that don’t result in a resignation, successive No. 10s have often been too slow to act. It took Starmer’s No. 10 over a week before it finally hit upon the obvious press line that the prime minister would start buying his own clothes, for example. 

But Labour ministers have been bombarded by other scandals that No. 10 has managed to ignore without too much difficulty. Angela Rayner appeared to have been financially advantaged in the way she sold off her old home, by declaring it her primary residence when she didn’t actually seem to live there – which was correctly shrugged off by most of the public. Rachel Reeves has been bombarded with queries about whether or not her CV received what look like minor embellishments.

Despite the weight of the words “criminal conviction” attached to Haigh’s scandal, based on what we know now it seems more like it’s in those categories than a resignation matter. Haigh’s story is that she was mugged in 2013 and believed her work phone had been stolen in the attack. 

When, a few months later, she discovered the handset and turned it on, it triggered an alert with her employer, Aviva – who the Times report had been looking into multiple reports of phones stolen (though it is not clear whether they all related to Haigh). As she tells it, on legal advice, she answered “no comment” during the police interviews, resulting in a prosecution to which she pled guilty.

Haigh’s story that the offence was minor and perhaps even only technical – that she had falsely reported a phone stolen, but perhaps as the result of an honest mistake – is backed up by two things. Firstly, she received a conditional discharge as a sentence, which is close to the very minimum punishment a court can issue after a guilty plea, and secondly she remained employed by Aviva until 2015 – which suggests the company didn’t believe the offence amounted to gross misconduct.

On the facts as they stand, then, Haigh’s resignation – and Starmer’s acceptance of it – looks bizarre. Haigh’s conviction is what is known as ‘spent’, a rule which means that after a certain period of time it doesn’t need to be disclosed by the offender when they apply for most jobs in the future. 

Despite that, Haigh has said (and No. 10 has not disputed) that she disclosed the conviction to Keir Starmer all the way back in 2020, when he appointed her to the shadow cabinet. This means that on the face of it, Starmer is losing a cabinet minister because the public has found out something he personally has known about for years.

What kind of message that sends to Starmer’s cabinet colleagues about the kind of loyalty they can expect from Number 10 is an open question – as is the question of what signal the resignation sends to the many people in the UK with spent criminal convictions who are just trying to get on with their lives. 

But the biggest problem for the government is that any story you can construct from the facts as they stand doesn’t make sense – things don’t add up, which tends to mean that journalists keep digging.

The obvious question is whether there is more to the scandal than meets the eye, which has to be the immediate assumption. It would seem most logical if No. 10 is going to accept an early resignation for that reason for it to get all of those facts out early, too, which has not yet happened – because if they don’t appear it looks bad for No. 10, and may lead to further digging anyway.

The second question is why Haigh didn’t get the story into the public domain herself, given she had admitted it to the prime minister. Unless it was drastically worse than reported, had she proactively admitted to the offence in an interview years ago, it couldn’t have been used against her now. 

Finally, whether or not things are worse than they appear, Haigh’s departure reflects poorly on the serially dysfunctional and dyspeptic team around Keir Starmer: either they cocked up in 2020 or they’ve cocked up today. If Haigh’s crime was worse than what we know, why did they not properly dig into it in 2020 when she was first appointed? If it wasn’t, why is Keir Starmer effectively firing a minister over something he’s known about for four years?

Something has made No. 10 decide that this scandal was not survivable at an extremely early stage. But pushing Louise Haigh overboard, swift and brutal as it was, will not be enough to satisfy the media. There will have to be an explanation, too.