Sheffield MP Louise Haigh says Starmer tried to ‘knock my character down’ after she left Cabinet
“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”
Louise Haigh has criticised Sir Keir Starmer for the “hurtful” way he removed her from his Cabinet and accused his operation of deliberately seeking to “knock my character down” with briefings afterwards.
Ms Haigh, who has become a key backer of the presumptive next Prime Minister Andy Burnham, said the former Greater Manchester mayor was already trying to shift away from the so-called boys’ club culture that multiple female MPs have complained of in Sir Keir’s No 10 operation.
The Sheffield Heeley MP quit as transport secretary in 2024, several months after Labour came into power, after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence related to incorrectly telling police that a work mobile phone was stolen in 2013.
She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast that Downing Street had initially signed off a statement from her saying she had previously disclosed the matter to Sir Keir but then his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney rang and asked her to resign.
“I had to really push even for a conversation with Keir, he didn’t want to have that conversation, and both Morgan and he kept saying, ‘well, additional information has emerged’, but at no point would any of them tell me what that additional information was,” she said.
“And afterwards they repeated that. And it was painful because they could have said, ‘Look, these headlines are awful, and it’s not going to be nice for you to ride them out’.
“And it wasn’t. And to be honest, I would have agreed, and I would have gone on that basis because I didn’t particularly want to ride them out. It was embarrassing, and it wasn’t pleasant to go through.
“But 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.”
Ms Haigh said she told Sir Keir about the fraud offence in opposition and that he had promoted her several times after that.
She said she had not had a “single personal conversation” with him since she left her Cabinet position.
“I’ve had to sack people in my political career, and you don’t have to do it in a way that it’s frankly so hurtful.”
High-profile women in Labour have spoken out about what they described as sexist briefings by Sir Keir’s No 10 operation.
Ms Haigh pointed to briefings against herself, Angela Rayner and Sir Keir’s first chief of staff, Sue Gray.
“You know, the idea that there wasn’t a cabal of men that were deliberately mistreating women around the Government is just fanciful,” she said.
Mr Burnham’s operation as he campaigned to become Makerfield MP in order to chart a path to Downing Street has already sought to change the culture, she said.
“It’s going to take leadership not just from Andy but across the whole political and staff team, and we’ve really tried to model that already,” she said.
“You know, Andy was really clear in the by-election that he wasn’t going to do traditional point scoring, that there wasn’t going to be a negative campaign, even against the Reform candidate, and we’ve carried that over already.
“You know, there’s been no negative briefing against any of our colleagues, which shouldn’t be something to boast about, but is actually very, very different from, unfortunately, the culture that we have seen.
“We’re really trying to model that, really trying to make sure we only recruit people who are absolutely committed to that culture.”