When Louise Haigh offered train drivers a whopping 15 per cent pay rise in August, she boldly said she was fulfilling a promise to “move fast and fix things” such as the long-running strikes.
Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, however, had a different description of her behaviour: “Going rogue.”
She was accused at the time of making the pay offer – gratefully accepted by members of the Aslef union – without first clearing it with the Treasury, and there were even rumours that Sir Keir only found out about it when he heard it on the radio.
The generous three-year pay deal meant some train drivers earning £80,000 for a four-day week without having to reform any of their antiquated working practices, and came just two weeks after Rachel Reeves had announced she was taking winter fuel payments away from millions of pensioners to fill a “black hole” in public spending. Labour’s opponents had a field day.
Many within Labour are tracing her demise back to that moment, believing her fate was sealed as soon as she “blindsided” No 10 and the Treasury over train drivers’ pay.
It would certainly help to explain why Ms Haigh felt the need to resign over a spent criminal conviction she had told Sir Keir about four years ago, and why his reply to her resignation was almost disdainfully brief.
Allies of Ms Haigh have pointed the finger for what they say was an enforced resignation at Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, who has already emerged victorious from a power battle with his predecessor Sue Gray.
They believe that as arguably the most Left-wing of Sir Keir’s Cabinet, Ms Haigh has become something of a turbulent priest for Sir Keir, and fell victim to a hit job motivated by internal politics.
There is evidence that Ms Haigh was being lined up for a fall even before Labour won the election. The Tories were tipped off about her previous conviction before the country went to the polls, but Conservative Campaign Headquarters was given the wrong location for the court where she appeared and was unable to verify the information.
It suggests that senior Labour figures were trying to discredit Ms Haigh behind Sir Keir’s back to ensure that he could not give her a Cabinet job once he got into power.
They failed, and Ms Haigh was installed by Sir Keir as transport secretary.
Once in office, Ms Haigh – a former Unite shop steward – not only set about spraying public money in the direction of rail union members, but also went to war with the owners of the cruise ship firm P&O, aided and abetted by her Cabinet colleague Angela Rayner.
In October she described P&O as a “rogue operator” and said the firm should be boycotted, which directly led to a threat from the parent company to pull a £1 billion investment in a new Thames freeport.
Downing Street’s displeasure was made clear when Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, was sent out onto the airwaves to make clear that her comments were “not the Government’s position”.
She was also a potential barrier to the long-discussed third runway at Heathrow Airport, digging her heels in over environmental targets being met at a time when Heathrow bosses warned they would abandon the plan if the Government was not fully behind it.
The Telegraph understands that it was around a fortnight after the P&O row that members of the media were first tipped off about Ms Haigh’s previous conviction, and that journalists were working on the story for several weeks before it was published. Whoever it was that wanted the news to be made public appears to have wanted to hasten the process by tipping off a second media organisation earlier this week.
At first, Ms Haigh thought she was going to be able to tough it out.
She was in Leeds for the integrated national transport strategy launch when a journalist from The Times contacted her team about the story they were working on at about 11.40am on Thursday.
Went ahead with ‘huddle’
Ms Haigh was on stage at Leeds Civic Hall for a panel discussion at the time, and may only have been told about the impending news story when she left the stage at around 12.30pm.
A planned off-camera question-and-answer session with journalists was delayed by around 10 minutes while she was being briefed, but she went ahead with the press “huddle” and gave no indication that she was expecting to resign or be fired.
She returned to London by train, where it quickly became clear that her admission of her past conviction for fraud, broken by Sky News at 7pm, was not going to be enough.
It seemed clear to Downing Street – whether at that point or at some point in the past – that Ms Haigh had not told the full story when she disclosed her previous conviction at the time she was appointed to the shadow front bench.
Her story that she had mistakenly reported a work mobile phone stolen, which led to a fraud conviction, did not tally with the facts being reported in the media.
She had been sacked by Aviva, it was reported, and there had been more than one incident probed by Aviva during the time she worked there, it was claimed. Aviva has neither confirmed nor denied the claims.
Regardless of who tipped off the media about her fraud conviction, her embarrassment represented a perfect opportunity for her enemies to get her out of the Government.
The timing could not have been better, coming as the Commons prepared to vote on assisted dying, making it a good day to bury bad news.
Deep divisions
Within hours of the news of her conviction becoming public, she had resigned. Although her resignation was only announced at dawn on Friday morning, her letter to the Prime Minister and his response were both dated Thursday.
In her resignation letter, which took up a whole page, Ms Haigh said that she had decided to resign to avoid becoming a “distraction”. Sir Keir’s response was just 66 words long, thanking her for her contribution and suggesting she still had a big future ahead.
The whole affair has exposed the deep divisions that still exist within Labour despite Sir Keir’s huge parliamentary majority.
The unions, and the Left, saw Ms Haigh as a hero, someone who was “doing all the heavy lifting on the policy side”, according to one union source.
Centrists remain wary of anyone from the Left of the party, and Ms Haigh was seen by them as something of a liability.
The unions, meanwhile, are convinced that Mr McSweeney had a hand in Ms Haigh’s resignation. One union source described Mr McSweeney as a “shadow prime minister [who] tells Keir what to do”, adding: “You’re a target when you’re on the soft Left.”
Allies of Ms Haigh insisted her decision to resign was “personal” and emphasised that she had been working “hand in glove” with No 10 until Thursday night.
One Labour figure, who previously worked as an aide to Jeremy Corbyn, said: “This seems like a very big step to take for a spent conviction from such a long time ago. What usually happens in these situations is people are told they are resigning.
“It’s hard to imagine that if this had been one of Keir’s allies on the Labour Right that he would have acted in the same way.”
