Was Louise Haigh’s 10-year-old conviction just an excuse to get rid of her?

As the transport secretary resigns after she was revealed to have committed a fraud offence, John Rentoul says Keir Starmer’s mistake was to allow the prominent left-winger to be a minister in the first place

The public account of Louise Haigh’s resignation as transport secretary makes no sense.

On Thursday night, she had been hoping to stay in post, as she confessed to “a genuine mistake from which I did not make any gain”, when she failed to tell her employer that she had found the mobile phone she had reported stolen.

But overnight, Keir Starmer decided that she had to go – and at 6am on Friday, she published her resignation letter, saying that her 10-year-old conviction for fraud would be “a distraction from delivering on the work of this government”.

A distraction on its own is never the real reason. If the prime minister thought it right to keep her, he would endure the “distraction” of a few awkward headlines. So what was the real reason?

It cannot be because of the conviction itself. According to her allies, she declared it to Starmer when she was first appointed to the shadow cabinet in 2020. The prime minister’s spokesperson has not denied this.

Starmer did not think, therefore, that her offence was serious enough to prevent her holding ministerial office, either in 2020 or when he appointed her to his cabinet in July this year.

This is awkward. The prime minister is keen to insist that his government will adhere to a higher moral standard than the Conservatives, higher in particular than Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, who were fined for breaches of coronavirus regulations. But it looks as if this rule applies only if people find out about a minister who has broken the law.

No wonder, then, that the prime minister’s letter replying to Haigh says nothing about the reason for her resignation. In fact, it hardly says anything at all, consisting of just three polite but abrupt sentences.

And all that No 10 officials have said so far is that Haigh resigned “following further information”. It is hinted that there may have been other incidents involving other missing phones, and that Starmer may therefore have wanted to shut the story down before it became more embarrassing.

But unless the prime minister is more explicit about what Haigh is supposed to have done wrong, he leaves the suspicion that he has been shamed into sacking a minister whose behaviour he had once been prepared to tolerate.

One theory circulating in Westminster is that the story of Haigh’s conviction was leaked by someone in No 10 who knew that Starmer wanted to get rid of her.

I wrote last month that Starmer was not best pleased with the transport secretary. Her branding P&O as a “rogue employer” for having sacked its ferry staff two years ago nearly upended the government’s big international investment conference when DP World, the company’s Dubai-based owner, pulled out. P&O claims to have improved its employment practices since the sackings, but Haigh said she was boycotting the company and would encourage others to do so.

No 10 regarded this as left-wing grandstanding and scrambled, successfully, to persuade DP World to reverse its decision and to attend the conference.

From that moment, it was said that Starmer would be likely to move Haigh at the first reshuffle. She already seemed to enjoy her reputation as the most left-wing member of the cabinet too much. She nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership in 2015 (David Lammy is now the only cabinet minister to have done so), and her settlement of the train drivers’ strike with no guarantee of reformed working practices in return was a mistake. It was a mistake that Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, signed off – but that does not appear to have prevented the prime minister from blaming Haigh.

In recent days, it is said that Haigh has been resistant to attempts by No 10 and Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, to change the targets for electric vehicles – targets that were blamed by Vauxhall’s owner for the closure of its Luton electric van factory. This may be the thing that tipped the No 10 assassin, if there is one, into action.

Whatever the mechanism, it seems that Haigh’s 10-year-old conviction is a convenient excuse, allowing Starmer to dispense with the services of a minister he thought would continue to distract from the pro-business message that he wants to promote.

But that he knew about it all along opens him to the charge of hypocrisy. If he were serious about high standards in public life, he should never have appointed her in the first place.