Prime Minister's allies accused of briefing Tories in 'hit' on Transport Minister in phone fraud storm

The Labour Left is in revolt over what it regards as a ‘political hit job’ on former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh by allies of Sir Keir Starmer.

The anger over extraordinary claims that No 10 briefed the media to force Ms Haigh’s resignation threatens to overshadow the Prime Minister’s ‘relaunch’ of his Government this week.

Ms Haigh resigned from the Cabinet last week when it emerged that she had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence a decade ago.

She told police in 2013 that she had lost her work mobile phone in a mugging, only for it to emerge later that the device had not been taken.

In a new twist last night, Sky News reported that police officers who investigated Ms Haigh’s ‘stolen’ phone believed a photo she submitted of the handset had been taken after the alleged theft.

Sources close to Ms Haigh denied that a photo was submitted. It came as her supporters made the extraordinary claim that allies of Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s Chief of Staff, tried to ‘take out’ Ms Haigh during the General Election by using a secret backchannel to the Tory campaign to brief them about the conviction – but they couldn’t track it down in court records.

The supporters claim that after Labour won the election McSweeney allies found out more about the offence and, when Ms Haigh annoyed the leadership by pushing a Left-wing agenda, they briefed it to force her out.

The claims are strongly denied by Mr McSweeney.

However, Ms Haigh’s allies believe she became vulnerable after former Chief of Staff Sue Gray was ousted from No 10 in the autumn amid a power struggle with Mr McSweeney.

Ms Gray’s son, new-entry Labour MP Liam Conlon, was appointed as Ms Haigh’s parliamentary private secretary immediately after the election. 

Last night, friends of Ms Haigh accused the PM of ‘looking weak’ by not standing by her.

They insisted she had had no intention of quitting on Thursday night until Mr McSweeney told her she had to go – with Sir Keir agreeing that she should resign.

That came as a ‘big shock’, one friend said, because Ms Haigh had given Sir Keir full details of her conviction when he appointed her to his Shadow Cabinet in 2020. 

‘It’s made Sir Keir look very weak,’ the ally added last night.

However, this has been contradicted by No 10 sources, who claimed last week that ‘more information had since come to light’.

Allies of Ms Haigh have challenged that by claiming her statement on Thursday setting out her past behaviour and disclosure had been signed off by No 10. 

One friend added that when Ms Haigh told Sir Keir in 2020 of her previous conviction, he had been ‘very sympathetic’.

She insisted: ‘Keir said then it was awful how she [Louise] had been treated.’

As Transport Secretary, Ms Haigh vowed to ‘rip up the roots of Thatcherism’ with her plans for rail and bus reform and had complained to the Treasury about impending cuts in the Budget.

Downing Street denies that Sir Keir’s unveiling of his Plan for Change amounts to a relaunch, but says he will set out how he intends to ‘galvanise action across Government and beyond with his radical next phase of mission delivery’. 

Sources said he will ‘set out ambitious milestones for change that will deliver real, tangible improvement to the lives of working people across the country in this Parliament’.

But Left-wing Labour MPs were still fuming about Ms Haigh’s resignation last night.

One said: ‘This was a political hit job. They had already tried to take her out during the election. 

‘People on the Left of the party can see this for what it was – an assassination executed by the modernisers around Morgan McSweeney.

‘It’s not Keir himself but the Right who have been gunning for Haigh for months.

‘It’s part of a wider plan to remove key Left-wingers so that when the day comes to replace Starmer, there are no genuine people from the Left as candidates.

‘Who knows who they’ll go for next but if I were [Deputy Prime Minister] Angela Rayner, I’d watch my back very carefully.’

The MP added: ‘If Sue Gray had still been in post, I think Louise would have got a fairer hearing on what was a spent conviction which Starmer knew all about.’

However, one backbench MP insisted that given how Sir Keir had told Boris Johnson over the Partygate scandal that ‘you cannot be a law-maker and a law-breaker’, he had to drop Ms Haigh.